


Between the Shadow and the Soul

by evieoh



Series: between the shadow and the soul [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, Introspection, Season 3 AU, Secret Partnership, Smut, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-08 02:18:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 34,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14094924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evieoh/pseuds/evieoh
Summary: After Malick kidnaps Skye/Daisy in an attempt to use her to open the portal, she is rescued by Ward and a butterfly effect is set in motion.[Season 3 fix-fic/Canon Divergence - goes AU at some point between episodes 7 and 8, though does contain some elements of canon from later episodes.]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all, my previous account was hacked and all my fics deleted, so I am reuploading them all now. This fic was originally posted in Feb/March 2016.
> 
> Thanks as always to my amazing beta/cheerleader/lifesaver stargazerdaisy. I would have given up in frustration approximately 3,000 words into this thing without her holding my hand through every step of this. (If there is a line of dialogue that makes you laugh out loud in this, chances are she probably wrote it.)
> 
> title from Pablo Neruda's Sonnet xvii:  
>  _"I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul."_

The low but persistent beeping comes through before she is even fully awake. The sound penetrates her sleep fogged brain in the most irritating way. She tries to roll over, bury her head deeper into the pillow to escape the noise, but is restrained by her hands being bound to either side of the bed. That startles her enough for the fog clouding her head to clear a little, though when she tries to lift her head and look around her vision swims.

The room seems to be small and lit dimly by only the soft glow from the monitors that surround the her. The machines themselves are also clearly the source of the beeping and seem to be attached to the many cords and wires stuck to her. The small bed she is in and the array of machines tracking her vitals are the only things in the room. She looks around for someone else, an observation window, anything, but she appears to be completely alone. She does spot a small camera in the corner of the room, red light blinking unobtrusively, but she figures it’s worth the risk of someone seeing her escape attempt on a monitor somewhere, if it gives her even the slimmest chance of getting out of here. She doesn’t know what the hell is going on here, but nothing about being handcuffed and having her vitals recorded like this seems like it is going anywhere good.

She tries using her powers to send a blast through the restraints to release her, but they seem to be made of some kind of dampening material, the blast reverberating inward through her bones instead. She closes her eyes and breathes deeply through the pain, trying to clear the haze from her brain and focus her thoughts enough to get out of this.

She swears she hears voices raised in alarm somewhere in the distance; it could be the team attacking or it could have been entirely in her mind. Either option seems equally likely in her current state. She needs to get out of here. She doesn’t know if the team is coming for her or not, but she can’t just wait around for a rescue that might not come.

The restraints clatter against the frame of the bed, as she tests them out, searching for a weakness. Dammit, the restraints themselves are solid, nothing she can do to shake them off. But as she looks closer, she can see the bed itself isn’t that strong, the welds are already strained. If she can just apply the right pressure, she might be able to get the frame to break. She’ll still be stuck with the dampeners on her wrists, but at least she won’t be trapped here like a sitting duck. It’s a little tricky to maneuver into the right position, but she finally manages. After a few tries, she gets enough leverage to break apart the joined pieces where her left wrist is tethered and slips the chain from the bar. Once that’s done, it’s a simple matter of applying the same idea to the right side, though much easier now that she can move more easily.

She stumbles from the bed, her legs giving out underneath her as she tries to stand, but she grabs ahold of what remains of the bed frame to hold herself up. The chains hanging from her restraints clattering against each other as she staggers through the small room in the same fashion, lurching from the bed to a small table holding medical instruments to the doorframe.

The hallway is bright - white walls, white floor, white doors. It takes her eyes a moment to adjust after the dimness of the room she woke up in. Everything blurs in the lack of distinction, and the drugs wash over in another wave, she has no idea which direction is the way out. ( _And where is everyone? If she’s been kidnapped, being observed, shouldn’t there be some kind of observers around somewhere? Then the more sensible specialist voice kicks in and reminds her that maybe she shouldn’t be worrying about that right now and instead just focus on getting the hell out of here before they come back._ )

The floor shifts and swells like the ocean beneath her, and she is reminded of the time she tried acid and the flowers started dancing at her feet.

She stumbles into the walls; whatever they had shot her up with is making her vision blur and her legs feel numb. The world keeps tilting like she's on a boat cresting a wave, and that really isn't helping either, as her stomach is beginning to pitch with the motions and she can feel her throat clench.

She just wants to sleep. Just give in to the drugs and let her body slide down the wall, sprawl on the floor. Give in to oblivion. But she has to hold on, cling to whatever shreds of consciousness she can grasp. She has to get out of here.

She struggles to remember the chain of events that led to her being here, but her head feels heavy and like it's stuffed with cotton. She is having a hard enough time getting all of her limbs to move correctly, trying to navigate the tar pit that is her memory at the moment feels just a little beyond her capabilities.

There are footsteps, moving fast in her direction. She tries to move away from them but she can’t tell exactly where they are coming at her from anymore, the sound echoing through the corridors until it sounds like it surrounds her. She sways against the wall, her head spinning and her legs finally giving up the ghost as she slides to floor. And then suddenly there is a strong grasp under her arms, holding her up. She can vaguely feel a hand gripping her chin, tilting her face up as she hears a voice,  _his voice_.

Ward sounds like he is calling to her through a tunnel, the panic in his tone barely audible to her ears that feel like they are underwater, "Skye?!"

"Daisy." It's slurred, but she manages to pour every bit of spite she feels into it. She isn't Skye anymore, Skye was taken apart piece by piece until nothing remained. He should know, he dug the knife in first; sliced at her with none of his usual precision, just hacked his way into her soul and then left her bleeding out and cold and alone.

“Can you stand up?” He asks her, glancing over his shoulder in the direction he came, “I was able to cause a distraction but I don’t know how long it’ll last. We need to get out of here fast.”

She tries to say something back, something appropriately cutting and harsh, but the black spots that have been hovering at the edge of her vision are swarming all over it now, and she feels herself sinking into the darkness again.

Consciousness fades in and out, it feels almost like she is just blinking impossibly slowly and the whole world rearranges itself every time her eyes close.

_blink_

… Ward’s hands cupping her cheeks as he peers into her eyes, she tries to flinch away from his touch but everything is fading around the edges again already ...

_blink_

... Everything is upside down and her field of vision kind of bounces as Ward jogs down the seemingly endless hallway with her slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. The walls are lined with looming grey boxes and as she squints her vision clears a little and with shock she recognizes the stasis chambers she saw in ATCU facility  _so much for being on the same side_  ...

_blink_

… She hears the sounds of the fight before her vision even fully clears, she finds herself slumped against the base of a wall in another fairly nondescript hallway. The sounds of flesh colliding with bone sounds like it is just around the corner from her and she tries to slide over to peer around the edge ...

_blink_

… Cold air against her cheek and fire in the distance, lighting up the night sky. Everything seems to be erupting into chaos but Ward feels reassuringly solid and steady as he carries her away from it all. (She hates that that is as comforting as it is) ...

_blink_

When she wakes up she finds herself in a strange room once again. This time though there are no machines beeping in the background and the restraints are gone from her wrists. Ward must have removed them while she was unconscious.

Instead there is Ward, sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, leaning over with his elbows resting on his knees. He is dressed in jeans and a brown leather jacket, stubble on the cusp of becoming a beard covering his jaw. There is a part of her that wasn’t entirely sure that she didn’t just imagine him coming to her rescue and she doesn’t want to look too closely at whatever impulse might make her subconscious pick him for the role of her knight in shining armor.

"Seriously? Are you ever going to get bored with kidnapping me?" she challenges, as she sits up on the cot.

"Or you could just thank me for rescuing you," he snarks back at her.

"What the hell were you even doing in an ATCU facility?"

"The what?" He asks, his brows drawn together in confusion, "I found you in a Hydra compound."

"So what, you're back with Hydra again?"

"I needed something from the guy in charge of that place. I needed to gain his trust," He shakes his head with frown, "Although, that's probably shot to hell now."

“Well sorry that my abduction ruined all your bad guy plans. Next time I’ll try to schedule it around your villainous deeds.”

“Skye,” he says exasperatedly, reminding her of when he was her SO.

“It’s Daisy,” she bites out.

“Focus. Did they say anything when they grabbed you?”

She huffs. “Not much. For evil goons, they didn’t exactly spell out their plans. I only overheard them saying something about taking me to Malick, whoever the hell that is.”

Ward stops his pacing and strides across the room to her with a severe look on his face. "You need to stay away from Malick. What he's planning, what he wants from you... It's bad."

"What are you even talking about Ward?" She demands in frustration.

“He  _knows_  about you, about what you can do. He is doing everything he can to reopen the portal to that planet Simmons was on. He knows Fitz figured out how to get her back and that you opened the portal.”

For once, she doesn’t have anything snotty to say back. “Oh.”

“Yeah. And since helping him get back there and unleash whatever powerful creature he thinks is there is a pretty  **bad**  idea, I’d really like to avoid letting him have you.”

“And I’m just supposed to believe you? That you’re not working with him? That you won’t just tell me what I want to hear before giving me up to him?!”

“I promised you I wouldn’t lie to you. I won’t put you in danger. I want to do what’s right.”

"What’s right?! When was the last time you did ‘what’s right’?! You nearly killed Bobbi!"

"She left Kara to die, no it was worse than that, she sacrificed her to Hydra and never looked back." His voice is low, almost a growl, "Kara never did anything wrong, she was a good person, but SHIELD abandoned her and I just wanted Morse to admit that. And then May set her up... And I..." His voice fades away and he clenches his jaw, swallowing his words and the pain behind them.

She feels a small twinge of jealousy twist through her, seeing the look on his face at the mention of the other woman, and she hates herself for it. Hadn't she wished for so long for an end to the sick devotion he seemed to have for her; the twisted love he had convinced himself justified everything he did? She wanted him to be gone…and then he was. He had finally moved on, found a connection with someone else and she hates the bitter, buried part of her that seemed to want him to want only her forever.

Hunter had mentioned how close Agent 33 and Ward seemed to be, but seeing Ward's grief up close, it is inescapable.

She turns her gaze away from him and directs her next comment to a vague spot on the wall, "So you just joined Hydra to get your revenge?"

"How many times do I have to tell you? I never believed in Hydra's cause, only Garrett. Hydra needs to be taken apart, and I could do that from the inside. But SHIELD is no better. They just call themselves the good guys as though that justifies all the terrible things they do."

“If that’s the case, why haven’t you come after us directly then? Why haven’t you gone after May?”

"If I knew where your base was, don't you think I would have come after them already?"

The question catches her off guard. She had assumed it was a conscious choice on his part to not come after them. The idea that there was something he didn’t know hadn’t really occurred to her before. She doesn’t know what to make of it, so she deflects and changes direction.

“It’s not like any of the team have exactly been keeping a low profile. May was living off-base for six months. If you wanted to take her out why didn’t you take your chance then?”

“It wouldn’t be enough to kill her, I want her to feel what I felt. To have someone you care about bleed out in your arms and know it’s your fault.” He isn’t looking at her now, his gaze on his hands and his jaw clenched tight. “I don’t just want revenge. I want closure, for Kara, for me. I want to take Shield and Hydra apart piece by piece for everything they have done. Shield always acts so mighty, the final line of defense, ‘never leave a man behind’, but they left Kara behind didn’t they? Didn’t  _you_?”

She flinches at the accusation, but she can’t honestly deny it. If nothing else, the idea that Agent 33 had switched sides should have been enough for them to bring her into custody, even before they discovered Whitehall’s brainwashing.

“They left Garrett behind too, left him with his guts hanging out and and he turned to Hydra. He turned to revenge, looking for a weapon he could use against Shield. He was so warped from the betrayal he felt by Shield that he gave himself to Hydra, just to find a way to hurt them back. And he wasn’t alone, Hydra grew within Shield’s ranks because so many agents felt that way. Garrett and others were able to bring people over to their side, to Hydra’s side, because of the disillusionment so many of them felt in Shield’s leadership.”

She scoffs a little, but he continues on regardless.

“He turned me into nothing more than a weapon.” He says it so frankly, not trying to justify or diminish his actions, or Garrett’s, simply stating the chain of events. “My family tore me down, left me hollow, and Garrett seized upon the opportunity to shape me into the man he wanted me to be. And I let him. I take responsibility for the choices I made, but those choices were shaped by Garrett, and he was shaped by Shield.”

He looks almost like he is bracing himself for her derision, those days in the vault coming back to both of them. But she feels so exhausted, physically and emotionally drained, and after everything that happened with Shield when she gained her powers, after having the agency she had devoted herself to turn on her like that, she can understand that feeling of betrayal. She can see why things happened the way they did, she knows her powers have the potential for danger, but she can still feel that bone deep terror of her own people hunting her down.

She still believes in the good that Shield does, but she can’t ignore the fact that things are not as black and white as she might want them to be.

And there is something about that line of thought, about seeing the way that Hydra could have maybe seemed like the more appealing choice, that shakes her. She has always just dismissed the people who infiltrated the ranks of Shield for Hydra as being hungry for power, she never thought deeply about the circumstances that led to some of them making that choice.

And she can’t help the small burst of bitterness she feels at the idea that if someone in Shield had known what Garrett was doing, what was happening with Ward when he was so young, then maybe everything could have been different. Maybe he could have stayed the way he was on the plane, maybe things could have been so different between the two of them. Maybe he could have just been the good man that she could see in him.

The stress of the last day has begun to take its toll on her emotions. She feels like she is holding everything together by the tightest threads, waiting for something to snap.

“I’m glad you were there, last night.” She says it so softly, barely a whisper but he hears it, and there is a moment before he quickly turns away from her, carefully shuttering his expression, where his face is completely open. Where he looks at her with such raw hope, like she could save him.

It's too much, it has always been too much. She can’t save him. She barely has the strength to save anyone at all these days.

Clearing her throat, she waves her hand in the general direction of the door, “So am I free to go then? Or is this going to be some kind of hostage thing?”

Following her lead, he shakes his head and his impassive mask slips back into place. He gestures broadly to the door, practically a bow really, “You’re free to leave whenever you want.”

“What, no black bag on my head?” She snarks, and his lips twitch a little in response.

“I think we’re both past that by now.” It’s such a simple statement, but it drags her back into their past anyway - his impassive face behind dark glasses, standing at the door of her van before he grabbed her and stuffed the bag over her head. The day he was walked from the Playground in shackles, his eyes not leaving hers until they were covered by the black fabric.

And she knows, even if she were to return in 20 minutes with a Shield team, there would be no trace of him in the apartment - not a single fingerprint or hair to link him to this place, no trail to follow. It will be as though he was never here.

(Isn’t that what she has wanted for so long? Why does that thought, the idea of leaving this room and never seeing him again cause something in her to ache? Her mind is a tangled mess of emotion, so much hurt and anger and resentment for all of the things he has done, but she can never truly extinguish the spark that he lights in her.)

Shaking her head to clear it of any impossible wishes she could make before she can even think of them, she reaches for the jacket laying on the end of the cot and stands up. She wants to thank him, she wants to tell him to go to hell, ( _she wants to be able to reach inside her soul and cut him out_ ). In the end she does nothing, just walks away without a word.

She is almost at the door when he speaks.

“Be careful, Skye. Malick has people everywhere, you can’t let him get his hands on you again. From what he said, he has plans for any Inhumans he can find, but especially you. And you should be very careful about who you trust.”

She can feel a snarky rejoinder on the tip of her tongue, but as she glances back at him over her shoulder the look of earnest concern on his face kills the words before they cross her lips. Instead she simply nods before walking out the door.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Following the events of her kidnapping and rescue, Daisy returns to the team with the news of a possible link between the ATCU and Hydra. The team infiltrates the ATCU headquarters to find out what they are hiding, and Daisy and Ward run into each other again on a mission.  
> [contains some dialogue from episode 3.08]

_We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut_

 

The team is assembled in Coulson’s office when she returns to the base. By the looks of worry of their faces and the information pulled up on screen, she can easily deduce that they were planning a rescue mission of their own.

“Oh thank God!” Simmons cries at the sight of her, moving quickly across the room to throw her arms around her and squeezing her tightly. The action makes Daisy’s eyes sting with the threat of tear; she had missed her friend so much, mourned her, while she was stuck on the alien planet. But it’s more than that, the simple hug makes her realize just how long it has been since their friendship felt easy and comforting. She goes to return the hug, hold Jemma close as long as she can as though it will bring back the way things used to be. But Simmons is already releasing her, stepping back as the rest of the team surrounds them. Fitz is next to hug her, a quick squeeze before making way for Bobbi, and then Mack is there, a reassuring clasp on her arm.

Coulson approaches her last, the look of relief on his face cutting through the last of her defenses, the weight the turmoil the last 12 hours has wreaked in her suddenly feeling too heavy to bear. He opens his arms and she leans into him, immediately feeling the comfort of being back in the safety of her team.

“What happened? You were going to check in on some of the Inhumans who have settled in the city and the last we could track you was to a coffee shop in midtown. It was like you just vanished.”

“I don’t even really know. I went to the coffee shop and then…and then it all gets a little hazy. There were guys with tranq darts and a van and I woke up strapped to a bed with machines everywhere.”

“So, how did you get free?” Bobbi interjects.

She braces herself for the fallout she knows will come from her next words, her shoulders pulling stiffly and her chin held high.

“It was Ward,” she forces herself to keep her voice steady and emotionless, “Ward got me out.”

The reactions from the team the moment the words leave her lips are exactly as she could have predicted, and for just a beat she wishes she had lied. She can feel Hunter’s shocked glare driving into the back of her head as May surveys her with narrowed eyes, considering. She puts off meeting Coulson’s gaze for as long as she can. When she finally does his expression is inscrutable but she can feel his suspicion like a physical weight.

“There’s more,” she quickly adds, desperate to move on from the accusing atmosphere the room has suddenly taken on. “Ward said it was a Hydra compound, but I saw the ATCU stasis chambers there.”

Her revelation is met with a moment of total silence before everyone starts speaking at once.

“Are you sure?”

“What was Ward doing there in the first place?”

“Where is he now?”

“I hope you left his Hydra ass bleeding out on the floor. Or maybe vibrated his organs to mush. Yeah, that sounds bloody brilliant.”

Mack rolls his eyes heavenward at Hunter’s theatrics before turning back to Daisy, “Did you actually  _see_  anything that identified the chambers as being ATCU? It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Hydra has an interest in Inhumans themselves.”

May breaks in over the top of everyone else’s voices with none of her usual stoicism, her face taut with concern, “Coulson, we handed Andrew over to them. If there is even a chance that there is a connection to Hydra -”

“It’s going to be fine,” Coulson says, a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “I had the containment module fitted with a transmitter and now that they have taken it into their research facility we can use it to find out what they’re really doing. Before Skye, I mean Daisy, was kidnapped, I planned what I tentatively called Operation Spotlight. The objective is to shine a light into every shadowy corner of the ATCU. I have invited Rosalind here to the base, and between her being away and the scanner in the containment pod, we can use this opportunity to get inside the ATCU. I want to know everything - what’s inside the facility, how close they are to this cure they’ve been working on, which inhumans they’re holding and where they came from. And finally, what it is the ATCU actually wants with them. And if there is a link between them and Hydra then we need to know that too.”

“Going in on the ground will be Bobbi and Hunter, quarterbacking from Zephyr One will be Daisy and Mack,” Coulson turns to Daisy with a concerned look “Are you up for this?”

“I’m fine. We need to find out what is really going on here.”

“Ok then. Running the extraction will be May and -”

“Him,” May interrupts with a nod in Lincoln’s direction. He responds with a look of alarm in Daisy’s direction, having been highly on edge around May since his role in the way things went down with Garner.

“Ok, I guess the new guy will gain a first hand look at our operations with Agent May.”

With that final piece of the plan in place, Coulson looks around the room appraisingly. “Is everyone clear on their mission?” At the murmurs of assent from around the room he nods decisively, “Good. Let’s get to work.”

 

On board Zephyr One, Daisy waits with Mack for Hunter and Bobbi, to get them remote access to the ATCU network. May and Lincoln are waiting with them until they get the all clear to take the quinjet and be ready to provide the extraction.

“Incoming data upload from Rosalind's phone,” Mack reports.

“Okay. Let's wake up the ATCU I.T. asap.” She is typing as she speaks, activating the transmitter on the containment module.

Lincoln is watching her with an impressed look on his face, and she realizes that for all he saw of her transition after going through terrigenesis, he has never actually seen her in action with a computer. “Did you just hack the ATCU?”

“No, but the containment module broadcasts some pretty intense encrypted homing signals. You put it inside a corporate office, and it'll wig the I.T. department out real good.”

The phone rings right on cue and she has to fight a smirk at Mack’s FBI impersonation. And then she’s up, Hunter parroting the script she gives him through his earpiece, “Of course it looks like a glitch. That's the point. You congratulate yourself, crisis averted, then go home, never noticing the polymorphic rootkit buried deep inside your system until hackers activate it to bypass that sweet, stateless multi-factor authentication code you are so proud of.”

Bobbi plays her role as the exasperated FBI handler to Hunter’s delinquent hacker perfectly, the poor IT guy freaking out as Bobbi pulls up Rosalind Price’s credentials on her phone and asking about any hardware that might have been brought into the facility within the last 24 hours, sending him immediately to his own phone to contact Rosalind. Evidently she must tell him to cooperate fully with the ‘FBI’ because he is immediately ushering Bobbi and Hunter through the hallways and to his own computer terminal. Quickly sending off a status update to Coulson, Daisy focuses on directing Hunter through the hack, exchanging a worried glance with Mack as they listen to Hunter’s slow typing, “Hunter. Oh, God. Hunter. Please tell me you know which one is forward slash.”

Mack drags his hand across his face, clearly counting to ten in his head before taking a deep breath.

“Yes. Typing,” comes his annoyed reply, quickly followed by a comment to the ATCU IT guy, she assumes in response to a confused reaction to him seemingly talking to himself. “I'm just helping your sluggish code keep up.”

Hunter’s pace picks up a little as he works his way through the login and then -

“Bingo. May, you're up,” Daisy tells her as the remote access to the ATCU mainframe is granted.

She is aware of Lincoln hovering somewhere behind her as she feeds Hunter his lines, his presence making her remember the kiss they shared after his former sponsor’s death. She doesn’t regret their kiss, and a part of her is definitely open to doing it again, but his awkward sweetness feels so jarring after her encounter with Ward and all of the history that still lingers between them. And so there is a definite sense of relief when Mack reminds him none too gently that he is supposed to be shadowing May in the quinjet, despite Lincoln’s obvious reluctance to be alone in a small space with May.

As they pull up the schematics to the facility, Mack speaks to Bobbi through the comms. "All right. There. Bobbi, enhanced specimen control ... North, stairs at the end of the hall, three floors down in the science division. Ringing your phone now."

Using the excuse of an incoming call from her superiors to leave the mainframe room, Bobbi starts heading toward the north stairs at Mack and Daisy’s directions, "Check that section. See how many Inhumans they're keeping in there.”

“Keep an eye out for any sign of a Hydra connection.” Mack adds, “And grab any samples of the potential cure."

They continue to guide Bobbi through the building, unlocking doors as she approaches them, all while hoping that Hunter’s extensive skill in running his mouth will be enough of a distraction for them to pull this off without a hitch.

After making her way through the facility, finally approaching the door to the enhanced specimen control area, Bobbi says gloomily, "Andrew was a PhD in psychology. Now he's a specimen."

Daisy unlocks the door for her and listens in shock as Bobbi reports, "Andrew isn't here. Guys, are you sure this is the right area?"

"That's the place."

"Well, there are no Inhumans being held here. Let Coulson know.” Daisy and Mack exchange a confused look at Bobbi’s statement, and Daisy can feel the unease that has been lingering ever since she woke up cuffed to that bed begin to spread through her bones. Mack quickly sends a transmission, updating Coulson on the discovery.

Her apprehension only grows as Bobbi continues, “And as far as a cure, it doesn't look like they're taking tissue samples, studying cell response. Not in here, anyway.”

“If they're not working on a cure in there, then what are they doing?” Mack asks, his brows drawn together in trepidation.

“Wait. Daisy, anything on medications they've compiled for study? Because I'm not positive, but those look an awful lot like fish-oil pills."

"I'll look." The cold feeling in her gut is only getting worse as she sorts through the ATCU files, trying to find the information on their studies of Inhumans.

Hunter is in her ear again, babbling something about hackers and kids with computers before suddenly, “Oh, bollocks. Uh, people, it's time to download everything we can and make our getaway. Our friend Mr. Banks has just showed up, and I do not have a handkerchief to cover my face... And that would be weird, anyhow.”

“Copy that,” Mack replies, but Daisy is too distracted by the information she is reading, that feeling of dread slowly working its way into barely contained panic.

“They're not studying medication, Bobbi. They're administering them, giving mandatory supplements to all their employees.”

"’To prevent infection’... uh, soldiers, office workers. And it says, ‘any public witnesses.’” Mack reads over her shoulder, quickly coming to same realization she has, “Oh, no.”

“They're playing the odds, giving Terrigen to as many people as they can. They're not trying to cure Inhumans, they're ... ” Her voice breaks off as she tries to fully absorb the magnitude of what is happening here.

But Bobbi picks up just as she leaves off, “They're turning them.”

And of course, that is the moment that everything descends into chaos. Daisy feels completely useless to do anything to help Bobbi and Hunter on the ground, opening the doors for Hunter and locking them behind him as he races toward Bobbi at the other side of the facility with Agent Banks on his tail, and telling May that they need extraction ahead of schedule is about all she can do for them. She tries to find anything she can in the files they have managed to get so far, searching for any link between Hydra, or Malick, and the ATCU, as well as what their plans are for the Inhumans they have captured or turned.

“Connection's down,” Mack reports.

She yanks her headset off in frustration, “Look. Last file we pulled... A catalog of all the Inhumans they turned and put into stasis. But…”

“Let me guess. They didn't put them all in stasis.”

She brings up the file of one of the purposely turned Inhumans with a status marked ‘active’, R. Giyera, with telekinetic abilities, as she turns to Mack with a look of barely contained horror, “These are the kind of people that Bobbi and Hunter are stuck in that building with.”

Listening to the sounds of the fight, Bobbi and Hunter surrounded in the lab while she and Mack are stuck on the plane and unable to get to them, is excruciating. But then suddenly Coulson is in her ear, telling her that Rosalind’s man Banks is going to get Bobbi and Hunter out, that Rosalind is on their side. There is little she can do but pass the information of the extraction point along to May, but her mind is reeling, trying to put everything that has happened in the past 24 hours together in a way that makes sense. Everything they discovered in that lab points to the ATCU being involved in something very wrong, being involved with Hydra, and to what Ward told her being true. But there must be something else that Coulson discovered to make him trust Rosalind to get Bobbi and Hunter safely out of the building.

 

Still reeling from the discovery they made in the ATCU labs, the team returns to base with more questions than they had when they left. Coulson orders everyone to the common room upon their arrival, promising as much of an explanation as they currently have.

Now the group is gathered, listening to Rosalind explain her connection to Gideon Malick (and her apparent total lack of knowledge of his true agenda within the ATCU.)

"He recruited me in '01. I met him when his company was consulting on a program at-"

"At NASA." Simmons breaks in.

"Yes, how did you-"

Instead of replying, Fitz and Simmons lay a series of pictures on the table before them, starting with the symbol from Will’s NASA mission, then the carving they found in the castle, a goat’s head, and finally - the Hydra octopus, inverted, completes the chain.

“The symbol carved in the castle, the one we found in the insignia of Will’s NASA program, it can be traced back thousands of years. It’s intertwined with the origins of different devil myths, cults and ritualistic killings. And now…this. It all ties back to Hydra. It is beginning to appear likely that Will wasn’t sent to the alien planet on a mission, he was a blood sacrifice for some being that we can’t identify.”

Tracing the lines of the Hydra symbol on the page, Daisy speaks slowly “Ward said that Malick wanted to use me to open the portal, that there is something on that planet that Malick wants. Some powerful creature he wants to unleash here on earth.”

“While I was there, there was this… thing. A presence. I don’t know how to describe it properly, but it pursued us, it was… It was like death itself.” She looks on the verge of tears, the pale jumpiness she has worn since her ordeal seeming more pronounced than ever as she relives the trauma of her time on the wasteland planet. “It attacked us, and Will fought it off, gave me a chance to get back through the portal, to come home. That’s why we have been researching the mission NASA sent him on, the true purpose of his sacrifice. We have been trying to figure out a way the re-open the portal and rescue him.”

Daisy looks at them both in alarm, “We can’t open that portal; not until we know what could come back through it.”

“Will! Will would come through it! He saved my life and he is still stuck on that planet!” Simmons cries.

Daisy reaches out a hand to try and comfort her, opens her mouth to try and explain herself but is cut off by Fitz, “You can’t expect us just to take  _Ward’s_  word for it.”

The rest of team is definitely looking at her curiously now, even if no one else has the frustration and hurt that FitzSimmons have in their eyes, she feels cornered and vulnerable. “I’m just saying that we need to look into this more. We can’t rush into this blindly when there could be a threat like that on the other side.”

“So we just leave Will alone there with that thing? Sacrifice his life just like Hydra did?” Simmons has tears in her eyes now as she looks at Daisy bitterly, “I can’t believe that you of all people would want to just leave him there.”

Feeling hurt, defensive, Daisy lashes out, “Well, I can’t believe you of all people would risk bringing a threat we don’t even fully understand back to Earth. We don’t know what kind of power that creature might have, and the fact that Hydra wants it here is enough for me to say that we should do everything in our power to keep it from getting here.”

The stung look in Jemma’s eyes is enough to make her regret her words, or at least wish that she had chosen them in a way that was a little softer. She hates the idea of leaving an innocent man, someone Simmons obviously cares about, trapped on the desolate planet, but this is not a risk they can take. Not until they have more information, at least.

Everyone shifts uncomfortably in the silence that follows, no one meeting either her or Simmons in the eye directly. Finally Coulson breaks in, redirects the conversation.

“Lincoln, do you know anything about the monolith, or the alien planet?” He asks, looking at the newest member of the team appraisingly.

“Nothing I haven’t already told you guys when you came asking about it before. I never knew anything about it at all until that day on the carrier, Gordon said that in the wrong hands the monolith could be lethal to our people, and that it was better if we had control of it.”

“Well then, problem solved. We’ll get there first, save this Will bloke, and stop the creepy alien Voldemort. All in a day’s work, right?” Hunter looks around, seeking approval for his assessment.

“How do you know we could contain the creature?” Mack challenges back. “We can’t hope to defeat it, if we don’t even know what it is. There’s got to be a way to take care of it, but we need to figure that out first.”

May has been silent up til now, standing off to the side of the group, but now she speaks up, focusing the conversation back on the original matter. “Gideon Malick has Andrew. And we don’t know what he intends on doing to him, or what plans he might have for using him.”

“May is right. Recovering Dr. Garner has to be the top priority right now, we can’t leave him to be experimented on or tortured by Hydra. And we definitely can’t leave someone as dangerous as Lash in their hands. We will do everything we can to look into the monolith, and try to figure out a way to rescue Will Daniels without risking the return of the creature that Hydra wants. Until we know more about what we’re up against, we can’t move forward.”

Daisy can feel FitzSimmons’ hurt gaze on her, and can feel the distance between them widening with this new breach. But she stands by her position. It is too much of a risk to plunge into something like that blindly, especially if Hydra is involved, and when she doesn’t even know what their plans are for herself, what kind of havoc they intend on unleashing upon the world.

 

The mission takes almost a week to come together. They need to find Malick’s base of operations and based on intel Rosalind manages to track down for them, there is a flash drive containing his financial records that is kept in a safe in the home of one of Malick’s associates, a man named Sylvain Faria. Apparently his career keeps him far from home most of the time, leading to his bored and lonely trophy wife throwing lavish parties at their estate on a regular basis. Rosalind informs them that there is a masquerade planned for the coming weekend and she manages to wrangle two spots on the guest list for them.

Everything is coming together so easily, it raises the hair on the back of Daisy’s neck. Something is nagging at her, making her suspicious of Rosalind’s miraculous intel. There are no obvious holes or concerns in what is being presented, so she can’t find it in herself to publicly doubt the ATCU agent. But she refuses to go on this mission without expressing her concerns to Coulson.

She finds him in his office after the briefing. The door gently clicks closed and she turns to face him. Now that she’s here she hesitates. The personal nature of the relationship between Coulson and Rosalind that has developed is obvious, and she is unsure of how he will react to her lingering suspicions of the other woman’s true motives.

“What can I do for you, Daisy?” He asks, as walks around to lean against his desk, his arms folded loosely across his chest but his face open and concerned.

“I need to talk to you about Rosalind. Are you really sure we can trust her? What proof do we have that she isn’t in on this with Malick? That they aren’t just playing us?”

“I am confident that Roz is on our side. You don’t need to worry.” His voice is placid, but there is an undercurrent to it that she knows means she really ought to drop this, but she plows ahead regardless.

“So, what? You believe her, just like that?” She demands, her face clearly showing every bit of the skepticism she feels.

“She was played by someone she trusted, who turned out to be Hydra.” Coulson pauses to level a heavy look her way, “We, better than anyone, should know what that is like, shouldn’t we?”

She hears the censure underneath his words whether he intends it or not. She can’t tell anymore if it is her own imagination or if the way she feels the rest of the team is looking at her, since she admitted that Ward saved her, is real.

She folds her arms across her chest as she meets his gaze squarely, “Yes, and that taught me that trust is not something I can afford to give lightly.”

“I am not giving my trust lightly. I have had my doubts and Rosalind has proven to be a valuable ally so far. I can only see the relationship between her and SHIELD being beneficial to us all. I am not going into this with my eyes closed, but I do not need to be questioned by you about how to do my job.”

“Are you sure your personal relationship with her isn’t clouding your judgement? Ward said that Malick has people everywhere. Can you really be sure that this isn’t all part of some bigger plan that we just don’t see yet?”

“You’re putting an awful lot of trust in the word of Grant Ward. Are you sure we shouldn’t be questioning  _your_  judgement right now? Don’t think I didn’t notice your evasiveness about what happened after he got you out of Malick’s compound in your debrief. Grant Ward is one of this agency’s most wanted and yet somehow he was in your grasp and escaped unharmed.”

She feels herself recoil as though he had actually reached across and slapped her. The look in his eyes is colder than any he has ever directed at her before. “This topic is closed, Agent Johnson, and you have a mission to prep for.”

He doesn’t even leave the room, just turns away from her and back to the documents on his desk while she is left reeling from his cold dismissal.

 

The journey to Faria’s estate is made with almost total silence in the quinjet, May is flying and she carries the tension that has become an almost physical presence around her since finding out that Andrew is in Malick’s hands. It drives away any and all attempts that might have been made to draw her into conversation. And there must be something about Daisy’s internal turmoil that shows in her face as well, because both Hunter and Mack give her a wide berth for the duration.

When they land however, Mack pulls her aside gently and asks, “Everything OK, D?”

There is something in his quiet concern that has her on the verge of tears without even fully understanding why. She wishes they had the time for her to sit down and vent about everything to him over beers and video games. The friendship that has sprung up between them in their new partnership has been a surprise but a welcome one. But they don’t have time, the mission comes first. So she squares her shoulders and tells him that she’s fine. He doesn’t bother to hide the skepticism in his face but he doesn’t push her either, and she’s grateful for it.

He goes to secure a vehicle to transport them from the airfield to the party, and she quickly changes into her formal wear. She and Hunter will be going in, with Mack on comms and May ready for the extraction. It should be an easy mission, in and out before anyone knows what they were there for, if all goes to plan. (Which should have been her first clue, because when does anything go according to the plan?)

 

Mack drives her and Hunter through the front gate of the estate, and she can’t help but gape a little at the extravagant display before her. Topiary hedges line the grounds, and the long driveway eventually circles around an elaborate fountain lit up in a way that makes it appear to glow from within. The house itself, some sort of French chateau hybrid, has been lit up for the occasion as well, and masked party-goers spill from the doors as lovers seek the shadows for hidden trysts.

These are the kind of missions where she really feels like James Bond - or rather  _Jane Bond_ ; ritzy mansion full of millionaires and secrets and her in a gorgeous gown, ready to break into a safe to steal a flash drive. It's everything she dreamed of when she first started training to be a field agent.

Her dress is beautiful, long black skirt with a thigh high slit and her arms and torso covered in seemingly sheer black lace. A black lace mask across her eyes, studded with diamantes, completes the look. She felt so glamorous when she first tried on the outfit back at the base, nothing like the awkward and unwanted orphan she used to be.

But everything about it feels stifling now; the dress is so restricting after the tac gear she is used to these days. She feels completely out of practice with small talk and smiling graciously at old rich dudes hitting on her is just uncomfortable as hell. She has grown accustomed to operating in the dark, being under the radar - she feels so exposed like this, even with the mask concealing the upper half of her face.

Hunter is running the distraction, sweet talking their hostess for the evening, and from the look of things he is once again excelling in his role as honey-trap. The poor woman appearing to be completely taken in by his over-attentive charms.

She notes the locations of Faria’s personal security and identifies the hallway that she’ll need to gain access to the study. She informs the team through her comm that everything appears to be running smoothly and can't help thinking back to her first mission, in Malta. At the thought of Ian Quinn, her hand unconsciously slides over her stomach and she flinches, feeling her scars ache.

And unbidden, unwanted, she thinks of Ward. Of that day in the med pod, the look in his eyes when she woke up. It wasn't all a lie, she knows that now. She wanted so much to believe that everything about the Grant Ward they knew before SHIELD fell was a carefully constructed facade, but she can't. The way they both worked their way under each other's skin, behind their masks, was not in either of their plans. Somehow, in spite of all of the deception that led to both of them being on that team, there was truth between them.

Almost as though she has called forth his ghost, she looks up and there is Ward standing on the other side of the room with a diamond encrusted socialite hanging off his arm. Even with a silver mask covering half of his face she recognizes him in an instant, everything about him calls to her like a beacon.

Her hand is lifted halfway to her ear, ready to tell the team that Ward is here when she freezes - he saved her life only a week ago, who knows what would have happened to her if she had been alone in that Hydra dungeon? Can she really stand by and let him be sent back to Vault D? Or  _worse_? She knows she can't just let him go, but the idea of Coulson, or Hunter and May, and what they would do if they found out he is here causes her blood to run cold.

She feels torn, knowing which choice is the one she is supposed to make but not sure which one is the  _right_  choice. And then as she watches, he turns and scans the room. She can spot the exact moment he sees her, his entire body turns rigid for just a second before he forces himself to relax (and there is a part of her that still loves the way that she can break through his super-spy facade).

Her breath catches as his eyes meet hers from behind his mask, the intensity in his gaze reaching out and holding her fast from across the room. The air feels thick around her and the noise and glare of the crowded room fade away as the two of them are locked into this standoff. She can't look away, the weight of his stare too heavy to be ignored.

The moment of connection is broken when Mack's voice comes through on her earpiece, "Everything OK in there, Tremors?"

She starts, her eyes skittering away as she tries to catch her breath, trying to pull herself back together. She is a trained agent, she can't lose focus on a mission like this. Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, she looks around the room to check that Hunter is still on target, before she touches her earpiece to activate the comm. "Everything is fine, making my move now."

She hesitates before shutting off the connection, her eyes going back to where Ward was standing moments ago, knowing he will be gone even before she looks. But she also knows deep down that she won't report his presence to the team. With the masks covering everyone’s faces there is every chance Hunter and Ward will never even realize the other is in the same room. That maybe she can get through this night without having to face that impossible decision.

With a careful eye out for security she slips away unnoticed, moving swiftly down the hallway towards where the safe is hidden in the study.

She knows he will be there before she even senses his presence in the room. Of course he would be here for the flash drive too; why else would he be here?

Ward is just closing the door of the safe and he turns to smirk at her over his shoulder as she walks in.

The sight of that cocky look on his face infuriates her and she dives forward to slam into the back of his knee. It causes him to drop down a little in surprise before she grabs his arm and wrench it over her shoulder to slam him to the ground. The high slit in her dress gives her a little more freedom of movement, but the fabric still tangles around her ankles, giving him a chance to yank her foot out from under her while she is distracted.

She knows she is being sloppy, her training has made her better than this, but the dress, the unexpectedness of running into Ward, still reeling a little inside from her confrontation with Coulson, everything has thrown her off balance. She is lucky Ward doesn't seem intent on causing any real damage of his own. He seems to be more focused on blocking her attack than getting in any major hits of his own.

She rolls quickly on the ground, the damn dress getting in the way again, but she manages to aim a glancing kick at the side of his head before dodging out of his reach. She has to get that flash drive off him.

He is getting back to his feet but she throws her leg out to sweep him off his feet again as she taunts, "What do you even need with that anyhow, Ward? I thought you said you and Malick aren't on the same side."

"I'm not on anybody's side anymore  _Skye_ ," he says deliberately, throwing his arm up to block her next hit. "I'm a free agent these days, like I told you."

She scrambles across the floor to get to him and aims a chop at his forearm, trying to make him release the flash drive clenched in his hand but he dodges it and grabs her wrist with his other hand before flipping them over so her face is pressed against the cool wood floor with her arm twisted behind her back.

There is an intimacy that has no place in this scene; his breath hot against her neck, his body pressed firmly against her back, and the rush of warmth that pools low in her belly takes her by surprise, followed a moment later by disgust at herself. How can she possibly be feeling attraction to him - everything he is, everything he has done? It was only months ago that he nearly killed Bobbi, even less since he nearly had Andrew killed, and he is here as her enemy. The feel of his body against hers should make her feel revulsion, not this heat.

She slams her head back, aiming for his nose but just grazing his cheekbone as he jerks his head to the side to avoid her.

"Shh!" He suddenly hisses at her, his body going still as he hovers above her. His head is turned towards the door, his focus clearly on listening to the footsteps she now hears coming down the hall.

She freezes, she can't be caught here. The mission requires that no one catches on to SHIELD's presence, that they don't know it was them who took the flash drive. She can't fight her way out of this but there isn't anywhere she can see in this room that could hide her effectively.

But Ward seems to be capable of thinking clearer than her in this moment, already jumping to his feet, two steps ahead of her as he grabs her hand and pulls her out of the study and into a small nook off the hall. He nudges her into the corner, his body not quite touching hers but surrounding her completely all the same. She is almost expecting him to actually kiss her, and is surprised at the tinge of disappointment that she feels as he simply maneuvers the two of them so it would appear as though they are a couple in an intimate embrace to any passing observer, but maintaining a careful slight distance between their bodies.

Her mouth is dry and her skin feels flushed. She is so hyper-aware of the warmth of him so close to her, his breath lightly brushing against her lips from where they almost sweep against his. His eyes follow the movement as she licks her lips lightly, and she can feel the distance between them decrease incrementally as her heart pounds in her chest. She is close to forgetting all about the security goons that this tableau is being staged for, all of her focus on his lips and the firm ridges of his chest where it brushes against hers with every breath he takes, until one of them suddenly speaks gruffly from right beside them, “This area is off limits to guests.”

With a brief searching look in her eyes, which she responds to with a slight nod, Ward pulls back from their ‘embrace’ to look over his shoulder at the security guards, "Sorry about that, guys. The lady and I were just looking for a little privacy," he winks at them. "Didn't mean to cause trouble."

Daisy holds her breath, hoping that the guards will buy the story, unable to see them clearly over Ward’s shoulder to get a good read on their reactions herself, but the way Ward’s body tenses against hers tips her off. His hand has come to rest on her hip and he tightens his grip in warning before spinning away from her suddenly and slamming the head of the closest of the two guards against the wall.

Daisy springs into action immediately on his cue, ducking down to deliver a kick to the knee of the second guard, diverting his attention away from Ward to her and quickly dodging the blow he aims at her. Her dress causes her steps to falter a little and the guard dives on the advantage, but then suddenly Ward is grabbing a vase off a nearby table and smashing it against his head. The first guard who attacked him is slumped against the wall and the second is looking dazed with blood trickling from his temple where the vase made contact. Daisy delivers a final blow and then he too is slumped on the floor.

Ward steps closer to her, his eyes checking her over carefully for injury. It takes her a moment longer than she’d like to admit to remember that they are on opposite sides, that it was him she was fighting before these guards came along. But in the same moment that she tenses into fighting stance again, ready to make another grab for the flash drive, they hear more footsteps, moving fast this time and at least four of them by the sound of it. Either there was a silent alarm attached to the safe or the first two guards managed to alert the others somehow. Without giving her time to protest Ward grabs her wrist and begins pulling her through the labyrinthine hallways away from their pursuers. She yanks her arm free just as they break through a set of French doors, the night air cool on her skin.

Just as she is about to turn on him again, the guards burst from the door behind them. She and Ward turn as one, sliding easily into working together as a team. A part of her is a little surprised at how seamlessly they fit together, his moves a perfect counterbalance to her own. But as much as she tries to forget those days and think of May as her only SO, he is still the one who taught her how to do most of this stuff in the first place. It really shouldn’t be a surprise that their styles blend together so well.

Three of the four guards are down. Ward is leaning over and trying to catch his breath as blood trickles from his lip, his mask miraculously still in place and she is twisting around trying to figure out where the fourth one ended up. Suddenly she sees him in the shadows behind Ward, his gun raised and his finger on the trigger. The panic and terror that burst through her blood at the sight of the bullets headed for the back of Ward’s head are something she feels totally unprepared for. Her hands are raised without even thinking of it, sending out a wave and pushing the bullets away before they can reach him. It propels the guard into the wall, knocking him unconscious. Ward spins around to stare at her in shock, stepping closer to her and opening his mouth to speak as he finally pulls the mask from his face, but suddenly Hunter’s voice is in her ear. “Uh, guys? Something appears to be happening. There are security guys coming out of the woodwork and I am thinking this might be a great time to get the hell out of here.”

Ward must read something of her distraction in her face because he stills before her, whatever he was about to say frozen on his lips, but his eyes are still staring at her searchingly.

May’s voice comes through the comm next, “Everything ok on your end, Quake?”

She is going to choose to blame the run through the halls and the four-on-two fight they just had for the breathlessness in her reply, and ignore the way her blood has been singing since Ward pressed her against the wall. “I’m fine. Ran into some trouble, but I’m heading for the southeast corner now. I’ll meet you guys at the extraction point.”

Ward holds her gaze the entire time she speaks, and he quirks an eyebrow at her as she breaks the connection to the team without mentioning his presence.

“I figured I owed you one for getting me out of Malick’s hands,” she says in response to his unspoken question, her tone aiming for glib.

He grins at that, sharp and crooked and so like the Ward she knew that it hurts. She closes her eyes for just an instant against the memories that suddenly feel like more than she can deal with after the rollercoaster her day has been. She feels his warmth against her skin once again as he leans closer to her, his breath brushing against her cheek as he presses something small and solid into her hand, closing her fingers around it as he speaks at last. “Guess we’re even for now, then.”

And then the warmth of him is gone. She opens her eyes to find him vanished. But when she unfolds her fist to see what he gave her, the flash drive is laying in her hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I played with the timeline very slightly, regarding Ward's storyline particularly, so if you have any questions about things I was too vague on, please let me know.
> 
> I also made an edit for the masquerade scene if anyone is interested, you can find it at my [tumblr](http://evieoh.tumblr.com/post/140082928824/skyeward-fic-between-the-shadow-and-the-soul)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daisy and Ward have an encounter in Paris. And she examines the scars left upon her soul by the way things happened with her parents, as well as the ways the team has fractured since Hydra emerged from the shadows. Ward has new information to share and asks her to meet him.
> 
> (Also, rating has been upped)

 

_You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it. – Alan Moore_

 

The next time she sees him is in Paris. She had come to meet with an older inhuman who had known her mother, to learn more about the history of their people and find out more about the monolith. The mission was mostly a bust, very little of what she learned isn't something Fitz and Simmons have already discovered. Now she has hours to kill before the team expects her back.

The sight of the Eiffel tower in the distance reminds her of the day she was first taken by Shield, when Coulson left her to interrogate Ward (and that truth serum she has still never gotten a straight answer about), and of Ward’s words about having been to Paris but never seeing it.

It is something about the memory that sends her out sightseeing. She knows it’s probably stupid. She should be returning to base now that her mission is completed, not wasting time pretending she’s a tourist, like she’s some normal girl exploring the world. She is not a normal girl, and wandering around a strange city alone is a risk she should definitely not be taking at the moment. But as she joins the crowd in front of the Sacre Coeur, looking out at the view as the setting sun bathes the city in a in a mix of lavender and gold, she can’t find it in herself to truly feel bad about taking this time for herself.

Maybe it’s just because he is already on her mind, maybe just because he seems to be appearing everywhere she goes these days, but she isn’t even particularly surprised when she looks up to see him standing off to the side, about 12 feet from her.

They don't even bother with the pretense of fighting this time. Maybe it's the peacefulness of the scene, the city spread out below them and the sun sinking toward the horizon. Maybe she is just too tired. She feels like she has been playing a role for so long and the idea of just having a moment to take off the heavy armour of her character feels so alluring. He seems to feel the same as he nods at her without speaking and walks over to take a seat on the steps nearby. She follows and sits beside him, a careful four feet between them, as though being just out of his arms reach would make her safe if he really wanted to harm her. ( _But that’s the thing, isn’t it? She finally has to admit to herself that she believes he doesn’t intend to do anything to hurt her. She feels safe with him, even as she knows it’s foolish._ )

They sit in silence for a long time, the crowd of tourists around them ebbing and flowing without paying much attention at all to the two motionless figures. She feels herself relaxing despite herself, the companionable silence between them giving her a sense of peace she hasn't felt in so long. She knows it's insane that she should feel this way with him, but after how disconnected she has felt from the team, how jagged and frayed her edges have begun to feel all the time now, this moment feels like the first time she has been able to breathe easily in months.

“Finally getting around to seeing the city?” she asks. That’s a nice neutral opening.

“Figured I might as well take the chance; with no organization demanding my immediate return. It’s not quite what I expected. How about you, Skye?”

“It’s Daisy,” she reminds him.

“Is it? Really? So this is the new you: Daisy the stalwart SHIELD agent. You cut off your hair and suddenly you're a different person? What was so wrong with being Skye?” He challenges her, his tone sharp.

“It was time to grow up. Skye was an idealist. I’ve seen too much to be her anymore. I found my family, why wouldn’t I want to reclaim my first identity?”

“Because you aren’t Daisy. Daisy was a baby taken from her parents. Daisy never had the chance to grow up. At least Skye knew what she stood for.”

“Oh, and you think you know me? You spend a few months on a plane with me and you’re the expert on who I am?” The accusation hangs heavy in the air between them. She wants to keep striking back, she feels cornered and exposed. He has always seen through her veneer too easily and knows just the words to cut through to the heart of her. But she is so  _tired_ , and the damage the two of them could do to each other seems so bloody and unnecessary. She is so sick of hating him, it is exhausting and it hurts.

" _I_  don't even know who I am anymore." The words are murmured softly, almost without her permission. It's not so much that the words themselves are a surprise, it's practically become a mantra in her head these last few months, but she can't believe that she spoke them aloud. That she said them to  _him_.

She can feel him shift beside her, but resolutely refuses to look at him, keeps her gaze on the vista before them, even as the city slowly melds into darkness, lights beginning to brighten as far her eye can see.

"Neither do I," he finally says after a long moment of silence, "I'm not sure now if I ever did. If I have ever been my own person, not just what other people wanted me to be."

At his admission she finally turns her head to meet his eye and the bleak emptiness she sees in his face causes something in her to shift, some part of her that she hasn't known in so long clicks back into place. (It isn't until much later, after she has left him and the sunset behind and returned to the team, that she realizes what it was. For the first time in so long she felt connected, understood by someone.)

 

The information they got from the flash drive is not the gold mine they were hoping it would be. They can track a number of Malick’s accounts and holdings, but he obviously has sources they aren’t aware of. The man is paranoid enough (or just good enough at the game they are all in) that his accounts change completely every two weeks, so by the time they got their hands on the information, it was practically useless.

Still, she and Mack diligently track down any lead they can find, trying to find any trace of where Malick might be keeping Garner, and what his plans are for the army of Inhumans he appears to be trying to create. The very idea of all of the destruction he could unleash upon the world, the harm he could do with these people who have no control of their abilities, and no true knowledge of what they have become, it horrifies her. The emotional scars of everything that happened with her mother are still so fresh; the pain and the shock as she realized what Jiaying’s true plans were, how deep her sense of betrayal ran when she finally saw how misled she had been.

Thinking about her mother leads her down a dark path. So much of her life was spent hoping to find her family, and then she had, and they had been searching for her too. It was everything a little lost orphan could dream of. ( _Hoping for something and losing it hurts more than never hoping for anything._ )

Which, of course, made the fall back to reality so much harder. She still has such a difficult time reconciling the woman she first met - the woman who looked at her with so much pride as she learned to master her abilities, with tears in her eyes as she told her about the night she was born - with the woman she faced that day on the Iliad.

But she should have known better; her mother's soft voice murmuring,  _"We're not going to turn on you."_  She'd heard that before, hadn't she? Shouldn't that have been warning enough after everything she'd been through? If it seems like you are finally getting everything you ever wanted, that just means everything is about to explode.

She knows that the team has struggled with her change from Skye to Daisy. They don't understand that she just couldn't be Skye anymore, not after everything that had happened. They think it's just about honoring the family that she never truly got the chance to have, but it is a wound so much deeper than that.

How can she explain to them how it feels? What it is like to discover that the father you have been dreaming of searching for you, truly has never given up on you. When you have to face the bloody body count that his search has taken. The heavy weight it takes upon your soul to have so much carnage wreaked in your name.

It was like someone reached into every fantasy she had of her parents and twisted it into something awful: Her father turned himself into a monster to avenge her, to find her, and her mother was willing to wage a war, wipe out the human race, to protect her legacy. More than that, the ways that losing her hollowed the both of them out even more than growing up without them did to her. She had only had a fantasy. They both knew what they lost, what they fought to get back, and they both lost themselves in that struggle. None of them emerged from Whitehall’s thirst for knowledge and power unharmed.

How can she explain that to anyone who hasn’t experienced it? The feeling of her mother’s hands against her face, the hands she had dreamed of seeking comfort from her entire life, instead draining her life force because she stood against her.

How could she explain the way she loves her mother still? The woman who taught her to take joy in her abilities. Who showed her where she came from, and who she could have been if the world was not so cruel. How can you tell anyone that you still love someone who tried to kill you?

How could she tell them about all the complicated feelings she has about her father? His hands were dripping in so much blood they could never be clean, but he loved her. He loved her more fiercely than she could even comprehend. He gave up everything in the end, to save her. The memory of his gentle voice, soothing Jiaying as he crushed her bones, as he made the choice so Skye didn’t have to. How do you make someone else understand that?

He was not perfect, he was so far from being perfect, but he was her father. He loved her. And now he is gone too, everything good and bad that made him Cal, has disappeared. ( _I imagined you perfect. You’re way more interesting than that._ )

It was never really simply about trying to reclaim the girl she never got the chance to be, she just couldn’t stay Skye. Not after everything she had been through; with Hydra destroying the first home she had found, not after everything that happened with Ward, not after finding and losing her parents in the same breath. Skye was a girl with faith and optimism, and she isn’t sure if she truly has the capacity for either anymore.

After everything that happened, Daisy was right there; another cocoon to slip inside and emerge transformed.

When she went from being Mary Sue to Skye there was no one in her life that witnessed the transition, there was no one that knew both of those versions of her. There was a little lost girl named Mary Sue who nobody wanted, and then there was Skye - who was free and didn’t rely on anyone, didn’t  _need_  anyone. There was no lingering changeover from one to the other, there was just a before and an after of her life.

But this time, this change, she is still in the same place, still surrounded by the same people.

She feels stifled by them, by their expectations of her, and she hates feeling that way. These are people she loves, people who became her family. But the gulf between her and them feels like it grows wider all the time. They don’t understand, and she can’t tell them, how torn apart she feels inside ever since finding her parents. Or more than that, because she has felt the coldness that began to seep through her and slowly poison the light that lived in Skye as soon as Hydra emerged from the shadows. There was never time to truly grieve for the shock of that betrayal, always another disaster looming on the horizon. And then there was Ward; haunted eyes in the basement vault, mocking smile as he took her from the plane. Her father. Raina and the temple. Trip shattering into a million pieces, her fault. Nothing was ever going to be the same after that. Her mother, and the clash with Shield, was just the final straw.

But the others don’t seem to understand how deep the change in her is, even when they have all changed just as much in their own ways. They keep expecting her to laugh like Skye, like Daisy is just a name and a haircut and not the personification of the storm that rages inside her.

The original team isn't even really a team anymore, not the way they used to be on the BUS. Everything about those days that finally made her feel like she had found some sense of family is gone now.

They all used to fit into pairs in a way, when it was just the six of them living on a plane, so it didn't hurt her to feel so excluded from FitzSimmons and their almost psychic connection, from Coulson and May and the levels of knowledge. Not when there was Ward there barking at her to do another five pull-ups, there for her to roll her eyes at when FitzSimmons went off on rambling tangent full of words no one else could decipher, there understanding all of the marks her childhood had left upon her.

But after Shield fell, after that hellish week in which every piece of the solid foundation she had finally found was torn out from underneath her, the bonds that held them to each other began to strain.

Simmons and Fitz survived the med pod and the bottom of the ocean, but she doesn't feel like either of them truly came back the same.

Fitz was the obvious difference, and the shame courses through her now as she remembers how she acted after his accident. She tried so hard to treat him the same, but he wasn’t the same and she didn’t know how to deal with that. And even after all that, he was still there for her, protecting her, when she changed. But after Simmons was devoured by the monolith he withdrew from all of them, and the bond that she had been rebuilding with him was gone too.

The changes in Simmons were quieter, so gradual and small that they were hard to pinpoint. But the bubbly cheerfulness that was such a defining characteristic of the scientist when they met had definitely faded even before her trauma of being stuck on the alien planet.

And now the two of them have isolated themselves in their search for answers about the monolith, about finding a way to retrieve Will from Maveth. Daisy’s opposition to their plans is just another obstacle to the friendship that used to exist between the three of them.

Coulson has disappeared into the role of Director. His attention has been spread so thin with trying to rebuild Shield, and the secretiveness that seems to come along with his new position has only made the distance between them feel greater. The ease that she used to feel in their relationship is gone, the warmth and comfort and the bond between them has all faded into orders and need-to-know and tight smirks. It’s a stark contrast to the genuine smiles he used to have for her, there are no more comforting hugs and fatherly sympathy. The argument about Rosalind is like an open wound between them, neither one of them mentions it, they just skirt around it, pretend it isn’t there. But it is. Just adding the list of things unspoken between them, causing their once-strong bond to decay from the inside.

And May just left. Everything about the bond they had built as SO and rookie, all the time they spent together in training, May helped shape her into the agent she became, and then she was just gone. For six months, the older agent shut herself off from the entire team. And now that she’s back she has closed herself off again; her focus shifting singularly to rescuing Garner only separating her from the rest of the team even more.

She was never as close to either Bobbi or Hunter as she was to the original team, but she has kept her distance since Bobbi’s torture by Ward and Kara. Bobbi has mostly stayed in the lab since being released by medical, but Hunter’s single-minded revenge mission has left her feeling divided. She hates what was done to Bobbi, hates that someone she once had feelings for could be capable of that kind of violence and cruelty, and to someone she called a friend. But the idea of standing by Hunter’s side as he plots Ward’s death is more than she can take.

Lincoln being on the base makes things both better and worse. It feels so good to have someone there who is on her side, who truly understands what it is like to be different from everyone else, to be hunted and be told that it is for the safety of the world. But being around him makes her think of her mother, of Afterlife, makes those days feel so much closer. It is a kind of bittersweet ache.

Being around Mack is easier. There is an ease to the friendship that she feels lacking in the rest of her relationships on the base. He never really knew who she was before, they weren’t close when she was Skye, so he has no expectations. That day on the Iliad cemented a bond between the two of them, some kind of fire-forged friendship that proved stronger than the distance there had been between them at the beginning and the outright distrust that had sprung up after her transformation. He is content to let her just be whoever she is now, he has her back in the field and they unwind with beer and video games.

The two of them work well together, falling into an easy shorthand, following up on whatever leads they can find on Malick and his possible location, as well as his plans for Andrew and the other inhumans.

It is while they hunts through every back channel they can find, that she begins to notice the coded messages, at first she doesn’t suspect that they might be being left for her to find specifically, but as the days pass and the information she gets from them pans out, her suspicions grow and solidify into a clear idea of exactly who is leaving this trail of information for her to find.

The ease with which she is able to locate him, following the hints he has left, make her certain this is a deliberate trail of breadcrumbs. Hunter spent months trying to track Ward down. Even with all her skills there is no way she’d be able to find him in under a week if he didn’t want to be found, didn’t want  _her_  to find him.

 

Daisy has followed the carefully laid trail of hints and clues to a hotel in Montreal. A quick check at the front desk for the name she found and she is directed to the hotel bar.

She pauses at the threshold to the bar. This is possibly close to being one of the stupidest things she has ever done. And admitting that to herself probably makes the fact that she is still planning on walking in even worse.

She never told the team about him being there the night she grabbed the flash drive, and definitely couldn't have told them about spending close to an hour watching the sunset with him. So how could she admit that she has been following his trail, a trail she is fairly certain he is deliberately leaving for her? That she has tracked down one of SHIELD's most wanted and she has no intention of taking him in.

Her eyes meet his in the mirror behind the bar as soon as she steps through the door, as though drawn to him. She makes her way across the room and asks the bartender for a beer, takes off her jacket and slides onto the barstool beside his, all without glancing his way directly.

Ward smirks at her in the mirror over the rim of his glass, side-eying her bottle of beer with distaste as he swallows the last of his drink, “Seriously, Skye? What are you, 17? You need to drink like a grown up.”

He shakes his head and waves the bartender back over, gesturing to his now empty glass and waving a finger in her direction to indicate the same for her, the next thing she knows he’s pouring two fingers of Irish whiskey into a glass, sliding it toward her.

She raises an eyebrow at him, “I’m perfectly capable of ordering my own drinks, Ward.”

He shakes his head at her, but she catches the twitch of his lips that he tries to smother.

She takes a sip anyway, gulping it down too fast and feeling it burn on the way down. The taste of it reminds her of that day in Providence, being able to taste it on his tongue, that look in his eyes. She shakes her head, coughing at the bitterness of the memory, “Besides, I’m more of a tequila girl.”

Ward looks like he is on the verge of saying something else in response to that, but then he seems to remember himself, who they are now, and the teasing glint in his eye disappears. She can see him pulling back into himself, all traces of personality fading and his brusque businesslike manner taking over.

She takes another sip, slower this time, and follows his lead, turning to him and asking in a serious tone, “So, what do you know about Malick’s plans?”

“Well, I didn’t get as much from him as I wanted before I realized he had you in his custody and everything went to shit,” he replies wryly, “He was talking about the history of Hydra, about the monolith. Apparently there was an Inhuman, thousands of years ago, who was considered to be so powerful that the others were afraid of him, of the destruction he could cause. So they banished it, sent it through the portal to a distant planet.”

“I’ve gotten most of that already.”

“Malick told me that Hydra was founded with the sole original purpose of serving this Inhuman, devoted to finding a way to bring him back through the portal someday. And until that time comes they send sacrifices through the portal, to serve the creature. He said that Hydra has had many forms throughout history, but the goal has always been the same: to build an army for it to command upon its return.”

“Fitz and Simmons want to open a portal, apparently there places all over the world where it is possible, if you have pieces of the monolith rock. There was a man on the planet, he was sent there as a sacrifice over ten years ago but he has survived. He helped Jemma while she was there, took on the creature to give her a chance to get back through the portal.”

“They can’t open it,” He says heatedly. “Didn’t you hear what I just said? Malick is building an army for this thing, an army of Inhumans he controls. And if Hydra has been waiting thousands of years for its return, then I’m pretty sure it isn’t something we want to come face to face with.”

“I know, I heard you! But I can’t convince them.”

“They won’t do it on my word,” he mutters, comprehension sliding across his face with a bitter smirk.

“I believe you, ok? I just need something more solid that I can take back to them, something they can follow up on for themselves.”

“Skye, I’ve been looking into this? They call this Inhuman ‘Death’. It devours everything, it will destroy the world and everything in it. It is indestructible, there is a reason your ancestors banished it to another planet instead of killing it. It can’t be killed. It can’t be defeated. We cannot risk having it return.”

She doesn’t bother to correct his use of her name this time, “So how do I get them to stop? How do I convince them this is a bad idea?”

Ward sighed, knowing all too well how difficult it is to dissuade the two scientists from pursuing something like this. “We’ll just have to find another source that corroborates what I’ve told you.”

“We?” she asks, teasingly. “Didn’t know this was a team effort.”

“Can’t have you out there on your own, Rookie.” Ward grins at her, and something sharp aches a little inside, how easy it is to fall back into this - the two of them joking and working as a team.

“You want another?” He asks, tilting his glass as the bartender moves back toward them and she looks down in surprise to realize that she’s drained her glass already. Ignoring Ward’s smirk, she nods at the bartender.

They work their way through the information each of them have found, Ward giving her a list of his sources for her to follow up on, warning her though that some of them may not be that open to dealing with Shield. They are good at this, she has tried so hard to forget that - the way they bounce ideas and options off each other, their different perspectives providing a good middle ground. They have at least the start of a solid plan to find a way to get the information they need, and a way to bring it to Shield’s attention without alerting them to his role in this. (And there is that little part of her again, that part of her that likes the way that no matter his feelings towards Shield in general, he will do whatever her can to help her.)

She downs the last of her second glass, enjoying the warm buzz and the slight soft focus it gives her brain. She feels relaxed and comfortable, more comfortable than she should, sitting here in a bar with the enemy. But she can’t really find it in herself to care too much about that right now.

“Are you heading back to your base tonight or do you have somewhere local you can stay?” Ward asks mildly, clearly noticing the slight decrease in her coordination.

“I don’t know. The team thinks I’m following up on a lead with some connection of my mother’s. They’re not expecting me back until tomorrow. I didn’t really think it through, I can find somewhere though,” she shrugs.

“I have a room upstairs.” He stops, and she can swear she sees him flush a little as he realizes how that must have sounded. “I mean, if you need somewhere under the radar to stay, if you don’t want Shield to know you were here, you can take my room. I can find somewhere else to sleep.”

It’s the sight of that faint color in his cheeks, the way he can’t meet her eye, and the whiskey that has gone straight to her head. That’s what she’s going to blame for the unexpected flicker of heat that stirs low in her belly at the idea of sleeping in sheets that smell of him.

Luckily her thoughts must not show in her face as clearly as she is sure they must, because he mistakes her silence for wariness.

“You can trust me.” He says it like it’s nothing, his face impassive and detached, so much like the stone-faced Agent Grant Ward she first met, but there is an undercurrent of desperate sincerity beneath his tone. That vulnerability he always fought so hard to hide. And that is what she responds to.

“I know.”

She isn’t even aware of how honest her words are until they leave her mouth, as she realizes just how much faith she still has in him. She came here alone and followed him willingly, full of blind faith that he will not put her in harm’s way (not again, not after everything they’ve been through.)

So she stands from the barstool, her head spinning only a little at the sudden action, and waits for him to lead the way out of the hotel bar, silence falling between them as they stand side by side in the elevator. There is something about this moment that feels just beyond her grasp, like she has found herself at a precipice without realizing it. Like something about how every word they say from here has the power to change everything, the path of her future at a turning point.

Trying to shake the melodramatic feeling from her shoulders, she focuses instead on the numbers lighting up as they pass each floor, on the feel of the cool mirrored wall against her skin, on the way her shoes pinch a little on the instep. But then she glances up and meets Ward’s eye in the reflective wall of the elevator, his gaze fixed upon her before quickly looking away.

The elevator dings as they reach the fifth floor, breaking the awkward atmosphere that was beginning to fill the small space. They walk through the doors in unison, Ward tilting his head to the left to indicate which end of the hallway the room is at. She follows him, their steps muffled by the thick carpet, not a single other soul to be seen or heard.

He pauses at the door, looking back at her with an eyebrow raised in silent question before handing her the key. She looks from the card to his face and shrugs, “You want to come in for a minute?”

The surprise in his face is clear, a brief flicker of hope and longing quickly snuffed out as he asks if she’s sure. She simply opens the door and waves him in ahead of her.

Flicking on the light she glances around the room, checking her exit points just the way he and May both taught her, lingering a little on the extravagance of the furnishings.

“Not exactly slumming it I see,” she says, a slight teasing note in her voice.

But he barely cracks a smile, standing awkwardly by the door still, his posture stiff and everything about him screaming of his uncertainty and disquiet.

She doesn’t know where the urge to set him at ease comes from, doesn’t want to examine it too closely. The sight of him so apprehensive is so foreign to her that she can’t help but step closer to him, smiling crookedly. She can feel the alcohol loosening her tongue. As much as a part of her is screaming at herself for even thinking about having this conversation with him, there is a much bigger part of her that  _needs_  to. That need to feel like someone knows what the hollow feeling in her chest is like. Someone else to understand the darkness she feels inside her, the silence she is drowning in. ( _And she remembers that desperate look in his eyes, his voice breaking as he begged her to understand, to forgive him, to_ love _him_.)

“You were right. You told me I would understand someday, and I do.” She remembers how it felt - the rage that coursed through her that day at Afterlife, all of her fear and anger directed at May, at Shield, for trying to destroy her new found home, her family. The cold horror of realizing how misplaced her faith had been when the truth came out.

“Sometimes I wish I could do it over,” she murmurs, her voice barely above a whisper, “I wish maybe I would have tried… I don’t know, done something different. When you were in the vault, when we handed you over to your brother. I was still so angry then, I couldn’t let go of how much you hurt me, I didn’t want to try to see your side.”

She pauses, her eyes stinging with tears she refuses to allow to fall. “But after everything that happened…with my mom.” Her voice does break now, a waver that she hates herself for. “I understand, how Garrett made you feel. Why you would feel like you had to be loyal to him.”

Closing her eyes for a moment, she continues, fixing her gaze on one of the throw pillows on the sofa and directing her words at it, finding it too hard to look directly at him as she speaks.

“It doesn’t make it all ok. But I guess I don’t believe anymore that everything about the person you were pretending to be on that plane was a lie. There had to be some of the real you. And I believe that you got attached to us just as much as we all did -” She breaks off suddenly, her throat feeling too tight with emotion as she remembers the way things used to be, the six of them as a tight knit team,  _a family_.

He hasn’t spoken a word the whole time she has been speaking. Finally she turns to face him, to try and read his reaction to her words. And there it is again. That look like everything in his world is suddenly clear, like she has poured light into every dark crack in his soul.

And it is still too much - too much responsibility to be someone's happiness like that, to be their moral compass and the light that guides them. It is too much, but maybe it is just enough. Because she feels the way the weight upon her shoulders lightens when she is with him, the way she can allow her mask to slip and not fear judgement or recrimination. With him she is free and bound at the same time, but she has always been bound to him - their bond has been enduring since they first met; cemented with saving each other's lives, tears and blood and love. The marks they have left upon each other (on both their bodies and their souls) are indelible. And in finally admitting that to herself she finds the freedom she has been seeking.

So maybe he sees her as his savior, but maybe he is hers too. Her destruction and her salvation.

Her lips are on his before she can even think it through, before she can think of the consequences and realize what a bad idea this could be. Because she wants it so badly in this moment that she is willing to let the whole world burn just for these minutes of his mouth against hers, his hands on her body and that look in his eyes.

For this brief moment of connection with a soul that truly sees her own.

They stumble as he attempts to walk them closer to the wall without breaking the kiss, her back hitting the wood panelling as the heat of his body presses against her.

The heat of his mouth against her throat is a sharp contrast to the cool air around them, his tongue flicking lightly against her pulse point while his fingers slide through her hair.  
She grabs his face in her hands, bringing it back up to hers and diving back into his kiss once again with a fury. It is all teeth and tongues and  _need_. Nothing has felt as good as this in so long, every touch of his tongue against hers pushing all thoughts beyond his body against hers far from her mind, dragging ragged moans from deep in her chest.

One of his thighs slides between her own and she grinds herself against it roughly, craving friction, needing something to ease the ache inside her.

Her hands claw at him, trying to drag him ever closer in desperation even as he is pressed against her completely. She feels the strongest desire to crawl inside the warmth of his love, to live in the safety she feels in his arms, leave the world outside to destroy itself without them and let the two of them stay in this moment forever.

And maybe this is what she really came here for, maybe she can admit that to herself now.

Ward’s fingers are at her waistband, fumbling with the button at the top of her jeans with slightly shaking fingers. There is a look of wonder in his eyes as he looks at her for confirmation before dragging the zip down and sliding his hand inside her underwear, holding her gaze the entire time. And this time, the way he looks at her like she is something holy doesn’t make her recoil. Instead she revels in it, in the idea of being so precious to somebody.

He groans just as loud as her when his fingers slip through the slick wetness between her thighs, his forehead falling forward to rest against hers briefly, his breath mingling with hers as her breaths begin to quicken, his fingertips sliding smoothly across her clit as he spreads the moisture around. He bites gently at her lower lip before pulling back to watch her face again. His brow is creased lightly in concentration as he studies her reactions to each movement of his fingers against her, finally settling in a rhythm that has her gasping and clawing at his shoulders, her nails digging into the muscles of his upper arms.

His every touch is deliberate, every single move his hand makes sending a new shockwave of pleasure through her body, coaxing sounds from her that she never knew she could make. She feels like she is burning up from the inside out, this fire that only he has ever brought out in her. She tries to keep her gaze locked with his, the look in his eyes sending new waves of heat rushing through her. She can feel everything in her body tense in anticipation of release, her entire body poised on the edge before he pushes her over with a final rough swipe of his thumb against her clit.

His head falls against her shoulder as she shakes against him, his erection grinding against her hip as he murmurs her name against her throat. The feel of his words on her skin sends a new wave of shivers through her as she begins to come down, slumped against him bonelessly, held up only by his body pressing hers into the wall and his thigh wedged between her own.

As the euphoria fades though, the cold weight of reality sinks through her body.

She can’t believe she just did that. Everything about what just happened is wrong on so many levels (but she can't quite shake that bone-deep feeling that this is the first thing that has felt right in so long.)

What would the team think of her if they knew where she was right now, what she was doing and who she was doing it with? ( _What the fuck is_ she _thinking?_ )

Ward seems to sense the shift in her. She feels his muscles tense beneath her grasp before he steps away from her, his hands falling from her hips to hang empty at his sides, giving her space as she sinks back to earth.

She can’t meet his eyes as she fixes her clothing, runs a shaky hand through her hair. She focuses instead on his hands, the way his fingers flex and clench like he is longing to hold something in them. Those hands that taught her how to make a fist, how to hold a gun. Hands that held her face so tenderly only minutes after he used them to kill a man.

“Skye… Daisy,” he starts, his voice broken and breathless, only to fade away as she shakes her head swiftly before she glances up and meets his eyes finally.

His gaze follows her as she stumbles from him, walking backwards because she can’t tear her eyes from his. Her fingers are trembling with the need to touch him again, the wrecked look in his eyes, rumpled hair and clothes, all calling to her like a siren song.

She runs.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daisy realizes the extent to which Ward has affected her and once again goes to meet him to exchange information. An honest conversation ensues.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can blame/thank serenitysea and stargazerdaisy for this chapter, who upon reading the rough draft of the story both declared that it needed more smut :)

 

She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here. ― Neil Gaiman

 

_His beard scratching lightly against the soft skin of her stomach, her hands in his dark hair as he slides lower._

_His tongue licking into her, sucking, biting, his mouth devouring her, building the fever in her blood but not enough to push her over the edge. He is teasing her, taking her to the threshold and then backing away, until she has finally had enough, dragging his face back up to hers by her fingers in his hair._

_The cocky smirk that graces his face is just begging to be wiped off but all she can do is moan helplessly as he wraps one hand around her knee and pushes it up, spreading her open beneath him as his hips slide into place against hers, hooking her leg around his hip as he sinks into her torturously slow._

_Ward leans down and kisses her, open mouthed and sticky with her own juices, his tongue sliding hotly against hers._

_Her moan is smothered by his kiss as he rolls his hips against hers, the head of his cock brushing against that bundle of nerves inside her repeatedly and sending shockwaves of pleasure swelling through her. She pushes her heel against the curve of his ass while thrusting her hips up against him to gain more friction against her clit. The shudder that passes through him and the way he moans her name in response are almost enough to push her over the edge._

_He begins to move faster, slamming into her now and she can feel the pressure building, the heat flashing through her blood as everything in her is poised to explode and_ \--

She wakes with a start to find herself alone, tangled in sweaty sheets and with a persistent throbbing between her slick thighs.

She spends five minutes practicing her meditative breathing, lowering her heart-rate, but the need refuses to dissipate. Her skin still feels feverish and tight, every nerve ending in her body feels alive and like it is sending sparks straight to her clit.

At first she tries to put him from her mind, think of anyone but him as she slips her hand beneath the band of her underwear. But it is  _his_  stubble she feels on her neck,  _his_  hand she imagines on her breast,  _his_  breath hot against her ear as she rubs her clit between her fingers. She stops trying to fight it, giving in to imagining it is his fingers dragging through the wetness between her thighs, sliding slickly across her clit as she groans and arches her back against the sensations shooting through her.

It's not enough, she needs his weight on her, his sweat slick skin sliding against hers, his teeth on her skin. She pushes two fingers inside herself roughly, thrusting her hips against her own hand as she imagines the feel of his tongue against her nipple.

She remembers the feel of him slamming into her in her dream, remembers the way the muscles in his shoulders felt under her fingertips that night in Montreal, the sounds he tried to stifle against her throat as he ground himself mindlessly against her thigh while she came apart on his fingers.

And when she comes with a smothered groan, his name swallowed before it passes her lips, it is to his dark eyes watching her as she falls apart.

 

A cold shower is not enough to wash away the guilt that she is sure the team must be able to read in her skin. She tries so hard to throw herself into the mission, following up on the leads Ward gave her (and coming up with an alternative source to tell the team she got them from), anything to keep from thinking of that night in his hotel room.

But the taste of him lingers. She feels haunted by it, by the ghost of his touch on her skin. The ache for him doesn’t fade with time, instead every day it grows stronger, gnawing deeper into her soul. But it is more than just physical, she yearns for the peace she felt as they watched the sun set over Paris in silence, for the ease she felt in his company as they drank in the bar. She misses  _him_ : The SO who used to bark orders at her, the almost goofy, awkwardly endearing side of him she saw over board games, the guy who covered her body with his own as the BUS was under siege that day in the Hub, the man who looks at her like she is every star in the night sky.

It was so much easier when she could tell herself that everything about those days had been a lie, but she can’t anymore.

He hid parts of himself, tried so hard to keep everything inside, but somehow she, and the rest of the team, had worn him down - pushed through his walls. He was always so closed off, his emotions kept so tightly in check that she sometimes wondered just how much he actually felt. But after things changed between the two of them, after she impulsively kissed him in a storage closet before he went out to face almost certain death, all of his carefully constructed shields fell apart. It became clear to her just how much he really felt - that he felt it all too much, too sharp, too clear. He kept himself so closed off, because the moment he finally opened himself up to feeling something for her, everything shattered. He couldn’t hold any of it back anymore and he had no frame of reference for how to properly express everything he was suddenly feeling.

Once she finally saw that side of him, she realized he was just as broken as she was, that their pasts had caused the same cracks in both of their souls. All of their shattered edges would have fit together so perfectly, if only things had been different.

She hadn’t been in love with him, not really, not completely, not yet. But she had been most of the way there. ( _She had been close enough that she felt her heart tear at the revelation of where his true loyalties lay._ )

She finally had all the things she had been longing for - a family, a place she belonged and people she fit with. And him.

And then everything had disappeared.

In the aftermath of Shield falling, of the home she had eked out for herself there being shaken so badly, of being labelled a terrorist, she felt the way she had not since those painful days at St. Agnes, when she finally realized no one was coming for her. No family was going to adopt her, and her family wasn’t going to, or couldn’t, come looking. She was going to have to learn how to survive on her own, take what she could find and teach herself how to make it.

Somehow being betrayed by Ward, having Shield collapse, felt so much more personal. It felt like a rejection of who she was, who she had made herself, and a wake up call to cure her of the last of her naivety.

And so she tried to become like May. To turn the rage that burned through her veins into cold resolve, and somewhere along the way she lost herself.

As terrifying as it is to admit it to herself, the closest she has felt to some version of herself that felt at peace, that felt clear, that felt familiar, has been in the few stolen moments she has had with Ward in these last weeks.

She finds herself keeping her distance from the rest of the team; her guilt over what happened with Ward becoming just another part of the ever widening gulf she feels between her and them.

She spends more time alone, parsing through whatever chatter she can find online, as well as tracking down the leads Ward gave her. Everyone else is so focused on their own jobs that they don’t seem aware of her distraction, of the way she flinches if anyone comes too close.

Only Lincoln seems really aware of it, or the only one willing to approach her about it, anyway. It makes sense she supposes, it’s not like he has any kind of connection to anyone else here. But as much as she wishes she could ease him through his transition into becoming a part of the team, as much as she wishes the soft way he looks at her sparked any kind of returning interest in her, she just feels empty.

He dances around the topic for awhile, as she tries to avoid facing it head on. But eventually it becomes obvious that they need to clear the air between them. He is someone she truly wants in her life, as a friend, as someone who understands those things about her parents that she finds too painful to talk about. But she feels too lost herself to be with anyone really at the moment, let alone someone with the history Lincoln has.

In some ways, using his addiction feels like an excuse, and maybe it is, but it does add to the list of reasons things can’t work between them. They are too similar in all the wrong ways. Their edges line up in ways that don’t match, like puzzle pieces awkwardly forced together and the picture they create is all wrong.

When she finally tries to explain all of this to him, stumbling over her words as she tries to make herself clear without revealing anything about Ward, she can see that underneath the sadness in his eyes, he understands it completely. Maybe they were both just clinging to the idea of someone who understood what they lost in Afterlife, what they lost in Jiaying.

He smiles sadly as he leaves the room, and as much as a part of her wishes things could be different, that she could be different, she knows it’s the right thing for them both. And at least it seems as though they will be able to salvage some sort of friendship from this. Maybe it’s for the best, that they had this conversation now rather than further along the line after things get more tangled and messy between them.

There is a definite awkwardness in the days immediately following their conversation though, cutting her off from the last person on base that she was really interacting with. Even Mack, she finds herself keeping her distance from. Their friendship is still new but in that short time, he has gotten very good at reading her, and she doesn’t know how well she will hold up under any kind of questioning about her current headspace.

So she throws herself into work, avoiding speaking to anyone, trying so hard to avoid even thinking about anything other than the mission (and especially not about Ward.)

 

She almost doesn’t respond when she gets a message from him requesting to meet up, but it feels so immature to avoid him just because she’s embarrassed about what happened. (And she’s not going to examine too closely whether it was the fact that she hooked up with the guy who is supposed to be her enemy, or the fact that she ran afterwards, that she feels embarrassed about.)

So she reminds herself that she is a secret agent with superpowers and she is perfectly capable of seeing her ex-whatever the hell he is and being a grown up about it. There is a lot more on the line here than her feelings and hormones, and she sends him a time she can get away and he replies with the coordinates.

It’s dangerous, going off base to meet him under the team’s nose like this, but luckily everyone seems equally wrapped up enough in their own concerns that they don’t seem suspicious. Mack is the only one to give her an appraising look at her hastily thought up excuse, but even he doesn’t question her.

She arrives an hour early, scopes out the exits and makes sure she hasn’t been followed or staked out. That all takes her about half an hour as much as she tries to stretch it out, and then she is left sitting in the room and waiting for him. It’s just a safehouse, a barely furnished studio he has possibly never used before - a neatly made bed, a single lamp and a curtain across the window the only decoration, but there is something about sitting on the bed that makes her feel flushed and uncomfortable. Feeling like the nervous high-school girl she never really got a chance to be, getting butterflies about meeting up with her secret boyfriend. (That thought pulls her up fast because  _boyfriend_? No. Cannot happen. No matter what certain parts of her anatomy feel at the thought of him, that is just not a possibility.)

Her sudden turmoil is interrupted by a knock at the door, she knows it’s Ward but she checks the security camera she set up in the hallway just in case. He is standing at the door, shoulders slightly hunched and his body held taut, at first she thinks it’s agitation, that there is someone else out there that he is aware of, but as he turns his head and the camera catches his face she realizes he is nervous too. The idea of that, that she could make the unshakable Grant Ward nervous, kind of kills the butterflies in her own stomach and she moves across the room to let him in easily after that.

As soon as she meets his eyes the air around them feels charged, and also like the underlying awkwardness may smother them. Neither one of them speaks for a long moment, the silence almost reaching an uncomfortable point when she finally blurts, “Simmons’ space boyfriend is named Will!”

Ward looks at her in faint confusion, glancing around the room and then back to her with his eyebrows raised.

“Okay,” he says slowly as he makes his way into the room, removing his jacket, folding it and placing it on the small table in the corner before turning back to her again. “So, that’s the guy we’re trying to save?”

“Right.” She nods, trying to contain the urge she feels to bury her face in her hands. This is ridiculous. “He’s managed to survive all these years, with that thing, whatever it is, on the planet with him. How do we get him back, but not let the other thing through?”

“From what I’ve found out, that might already be impossible.”

She looks at him in complete confusion, “What are you talking about?”

“The Inhuman itself is immortal, but It isn’t bound to a physical body,” Ward says, as he turns the full intensity of his gaze on her. “It possesses the body of someone who has recently died close to him, whether bodies of people sacrificed to it or people It kills itself. It can access the skills and memories of the host, but has none of the emotional connections. Physical damage to the host body doesn’t harm it, at worst, if the body is completely destroyed, It simply finds a new host.”

“So wait, does that mean Will might actually be the creature?” Confused doesn’t even begin to cover what she’s feeling now.

“I’m just saying it’s a possibility. You said he’s been there for more than a decade right? What else did Simmons tell you about him, about her time there?” There is something in his tone, in the way he is looking at her, that reminds her so much of when he was her SO. He is firm but patient, waiting for her to get there on her own, draw her own conclusions. And just like that night in the bar, she is struck by how much she has missed this, working through a plan with him, the way it feels to be on the same team.

“She said that she saw something, or felt something while she was on that planet, but she was  _with_  Will. She saw him fight the creature off to give her time to get to the portal, so he couldn’t have been the presence she felt.”

“Okay, but that was the last thing she saw? Will fighting It? Doesn’t that make it seem even more possible then that the creature could have killed him then?”

She feels her helplessness growing, her chances of working out a way to keep the world safe and salvage her friendship with Simmons at the same time slipping through her fingers as she watches. “So what are you saying, chances are either Will is dead or being possessed by this creature?”

“I’m saying that from everything we have learned, it is definitely too great a risk to open that portal. Even if he is still alive, how could we know for sure that it’s him and not It? And how could we bring him back without giving the creature a way back too, if they are separate?”

She sinks down on the bed, with her head in her hands. “How can I ask her to give up on the guy that protected her and took care of her? That she loves? What kind of a friend, of a person, does that make me?” She looks up at him with pleading eyes.

Ward sits next to her, and takes one of her hands in his. “It makes you a strong person. It makes you someone who can weigh the lives of everyone else against one man, even though you know it’s going to hurt your friend. Even though you know she might not forgive you. You still want to save her and everyone else. That makes you a  **good**  person.”

Staring at him with tears stinging behind her eyes, the echo in her mind of her words from so long ago, as he finally bared his soul to her. Drawing the hand holding hers up to rest against her cheek she leans into it, the look in his eyes cutting through any remaining walls she had in place to keep him out.

She makes the first move, ( _she has always been the one to make the first move_ ) leaning in to kiss him, gentle and slow, nothing like the hunger and fury that drove her on that night in his hotel room. This kiss feels like a promise, like something more than she can even acknowledge in this moment. It feels like  _I’m sorry_. It feels like benediction.

His fingertips skate across her jaw, sliding into her hair and holding her there, not so firmly that she couldn’t move away if she wanted, but just enough that she can feel him pouring everything he has into his kiss. He touches her like she’s delicate, like he is afraid if he holds her too roughly, kisses her with too much passion, she will disappear. And she remembers that feeling ( _hoping for something and losing it hurts more than never hoping for anything_ ) so well, she hates the idea of causing that ache. She is still so terrified of whatever this is, and she has no idea on earth how there can possibly be a future for the two of them, but she can’t deny how much she wants this,  _needs_  him, anymore. Not to herself and not to him. There has been so much deception and pain in their story already, even if this is just for one night then she wants a chance for it to be a clear slate between them. A night with no weapons or half-truths, just their bodies and this aching sincerity.

She pulls back to look him in the eye, holding his face in her hand as he tries to flinch away, “I’m here, okay? I want this.”

She can see the memory in his face at the same moment it echoes through her mind ( _What I want is to stay here and pretend the world outside doesn’t exist._ )

And now it’s her turn to flinch away as her resolve wavers. What are these feelings she has in the face of everything they have done to each other? Is there a chance of this ever being a pleasant memory, or just another painful one? Is it worth the risk when she knows this might end with her heart in shreds once again?

But this time he catches her as she begins to pull away, his hand resting on her jaw turning her gaze back to meet his, ducking his head slightly to catch her eye, “Hey, cards on the table this time, right?”

She nods.

“I want a chance to do this right, to make the choices I wish I could have made back then. Be the good man you believed I was. I’m not… I know there are still things I need to fix, things I need to do better, but I just want the chance to try.”

At the earnest look in his face she feels the last vestiges of hesitation slip away, feels the old hurt fading from her heart, making room for him, for the future possibilities. Leaning in again, she kisses him with her whole open heart, pouring everything she feels into it. He responds hungrily, diving in, she can practically taste his grin against her mouth. All of their previous uncertainty has disappeared, lost now in the eagerness to explore each other.

They undress each other between kisses, breaking apart to pull shirts over heads, fumbling as they try to kick off boots that require a lot more effort than that, finally pulling apart to deal with annoying details like bootlaces and belt buckles before tumbling back onto the bed. And then Ward is hovering over her in nothing but his underwear and everything suddenly comes into sharp focus.

She saw him shirtless so many times on when they were on the bus - in training, passing each other in the tiny living spaces between their bunks and the bathroom, the many times Simmons had to patch him up. However, there was always that small part of social propriety that kept her from ogling him as much as she might have wanted. But here, now, his body is display entirely for her. She can stare and touch and lick every inch of him if she wants to. It is an oddly heady realization.

His eyes widen with apprehension as she pushes her hands against his chest, and she smiles as reassuringly as she can with the way her blood is rushing in her head, nudging him back to lay on the bed, she straddles his hips and reaches behind her back to unclip her bra. His eyes drink in the sight of her breasts as they are uncovered and she can’t help but push them together, teasing him, loving the sense of power the glazed look in his eye gives her. Trailing her fingertips along his stomach and up to his chest, enjoying the way his muscles tense beneath her touch, smirking at how tightly he is holding himself to not react to the tickling. She leans down to kiss him, a soft brush of her lips against his before moving across his jaw and biting gently at his ear.

She makes her way down his body, stopping to explore every muscle and scar that ever fascinated her. She is taking her time now that she finally has this chance to do so, remembering in the back of her mind all the nights she quietly got herself off imagining the way his skin would feel beneath her fingers.

She pauses when she reaches the neat round marks along his right side. There is something like an apology stuck in her throat, smothered by the hurt and anger that she still can’t quite let go of completely. Frozen, trying so hard to think of a way to explain the messy tangle of emotions that those scars represent, she feels his hand squeeze hers. Looking up she finds a look of complete understanding in his face. He reaches out and tucks her hair behind her ear, brushing his hand against her cheek. She leans into it, suddenly on the verge of tears as she feels the ridge of scar tissue on his wrist where it rests against her chin, remembers the harsh words she threw at him like weapons that first day in the vault. She turns her face to press her lips against his wrist, before leaning down and kissing the wounds she left on him that day in San Juan. She kisses each mark, her hand squeezing the one still grasping hers, resting her forehead against his skin and breathing deeply for a long moment as his free hand finds it’s way to her head, running his fingers through her hair soothingly.

They have both caused so much damage - to each other, to others, to themselves. She wants to feel peaceful, she wants to rest. She doesn’t want to keep hating him, she doesn’t want to keep denying the part of her soul that calls for him. She doesn’t want to fight this anymore.

Pressing one final kiss against the scars on his side, she slides further down his body, peppering him with light kisses as she goes. As she reaches the waistband of his underwear she looks up to meet his eyes, fixed on her face, his expression a mix of apprehension warring with desire. His pupils are blown, his irises appearing completely black in the low light of the room, and he looks like he wants to speak but can’t remember how to form the words he wants to say. Holding his gaze, she pulls his underwear down slowly, finally breaking their eye contact to glance down when his cock springs free. She runs her fingernail gently down the length of him, as his erection strains against her, his hand leaving her hair to clench into a fist against his hips. The sight of that, him still holding so tightly to his self-control, makes her determined to make him lose it. Grinning wickedly up at him she leans down and runs her tongue from base to tip, revelling in the wrecked groan she draws from him even as he tries to smother it.

She leans down again, repeats the motion, with her hand sliding across his thigh to gently cup his balls as she continues to lick up and down his shaft, her tongue swirling around the head and causing another groan to escape him. His hand moves hesitantly towards her, his fingertips brushing against her hair but she can feel how tightly he is still holding himself, how much he is trying to restrain himself. When she glances up at his face, his jaw is clenched, his eyes fixed on her face as he tries to hold himself steady. So holding his gaze, she grabs his hand and moves it to the back of her head, at first he just rests it there gently, but when she finally takes his length into her mouth his hand clenches reflexively in her hair and she moans around him.

She sets a rhythm, her hand sliding around his base and holding him firmly as she swirls her tongue around the tip before hollowing out her cheeks as she takes him as deep as she can, sucking hard in contrast to the teasing flicks of her tongue. She can feel him relaxing finally, his hips jerking slightly against her as his hand tightens in her hair, never pulling her in more than she is comfortable with but holding her firm nonetheless. When she looks up, his eyes are closed, his lip caught between his teeth as little groans break free. He looks completely wrecked and it is the hottest thing she has ever seen. Something about being able to reduce this restrained and self-controlled man to this state, about being able to see him this vulnerable, that makes her realize just how much power she has always had over him.

Eventually he pulls her back up his body, kissing her messily and desperately, all traces of the smooth and disciplined Grant Ward gone. His hands cupping her cheeks and his tongue licking into her mouth, his teeth on her lip, feverish but somehow still gentle. There is something in this kiss that feels more honest than any she ever experienced before. Something about both of them being so present in this moment and so open and exposed, both willingly vulnerable, that makes this feel more real than any other moment they have shared.

She reaches to push her underwear down her legs, her hand moving between their bodies as she positions herself over his erection, sliding down on him with an exquisite slowness. Her eyes keep wanting to close, to immerse herself in the sensation of him filling her, but she forces herself to keep her eyes on his, on the look of soft awe on his face as he looks up at her.

His hands move to rest against the back of her thighs as she rolls her hips against his, his eyes rolling up as he groans her name, his voice sounding ragged already.

There is none of the frenzied heat of the hotel room, none of the roughness from her dream. There is a soft hesitance here, a sweetness that reminds her of their second kiss, in Providence, before everything went so wrong. As if somehow everything that happened, while still there, has had all the sting removed. As if they are finally getting a chance to relive that moment, without all the pain that followed so swiftly after it.

The two of them set a gentle rhythm, his hands bracing her thighs as she rocks against him. She feels drunk on the look in his eyes as she moves above him, the air filled with only the gasps and sighs as they lose themselves in each other. She never expected that Ward would be such a vocal lover, but every moan he makes shoots through her body like a spark, sending shocks straight to her clit. She leans forward, bracing her hands on his chest, changing the angle of his cock inside her and begins to move faster, savoring the feel of him sliding against her. She becomes determined to make him fall apart, to see the last small vestiges of stoicism he is clinging to shatter, rocking against him harder, pushing her breasts toward him as they bounce a little with her movement. His eyes are beginning to glaze, his fingers clenching in the flesh of her thighs, his hips jerking up against hers now, meeting her thrusts with equal force. Her orgasm almost takes her by surprise when it happens, she has been so focused on him; on his face, on the sounds he makes, on the feel of his hands on her. It hits her hard and fast, a wave crashing over her and pulling her under deep, blocking out anything else but the sensations flooding through her, her entire body feeling alive with the sparks tingling along her skin, from the pulsing deep within her. She can faintly hear Ward’s voice, crying out her name hoarsely, but the sound, like the hands digging into the skin of her hips, feel so far away. When she finally comes back to herself, he is still staring up at her, an expression of awe coloring his features as he rocks her gently through the aftershocks of her orgasm, and she wonders if she will ever get used to the way he looks at her like that.

She slumps against him, spent, her sweat slicked skin sliding against his, her face buried in his throat. She can feel his breath as it rushes past her ear, sounding ragged and harsh, his pulse pounding beneath her head.

The two of them lie in a mess of tangled limbs, dozing on and off but clinging to each other the whole time, both hesitant to allow the slightest physical distance in the wake of the emotional intimacy they shared. Every single part of her feels sated and practically boneless in her contentment. She knows that there is a world out there that will not let this moment last, and that eventually, sooner rather than later, she is going to have to leave this bed and deal with the consequences of the choices she has made tonight. With the decisions she feels on the verge of making. But for right now, here in this barren apartment, the world outside doesn’t exist. All there is is the two of them, voices hushed as they whisper their secrets and bare their souls. She can’t think of a time she felt as close to another person as this, and maybe there is something in the way they did this backwards - began with their worst betrayals and hurts and finally having this intimacy now, that makes everything feel clearer now, stronger.

Of course, eventually the real world intrudes on them. Her phone buzzes from the pocket of her discarded jeans. She is hesitant to answer it because the idea of laying naked in a bed with Ward, while talking to someone on the team feels like both of her worlds colliding in a way she is so not ready to even contemplate. But she knows Coulson is against the idea of her going off base alone these days as it is, so not answering is only going to lead to probable panic on the other end of the line. She gets out the bed and wraps the quilt around herself before answering though, as though Coulson will be able to sense both her nudity and her proximity to Ward through the phone.

“Hey, AC.” She aims for casual and overshoots it by a mile, pulling out a nickname that hasn’t been used in so long she can scarcely recall when the last time was, and her tone sounding almost maniacally cheerful. From the corner of her eye she can see Ward’s eyebrow raise in her direction before he shakes his head in amusement.

As soon as Coulson speaks though, all of her pretense at normalcy disappears in an instant, panic and fear flooding through her at his words. Ward can clearly read the change in her body, moving quickly from the bed to dress as silently as he can, reaching for his gun and her clothes at the same time. He doesn’t speak until she’s hung up the phone, handing her clothes to her as he asks, “What’s happened?”

She feels like all of her carefully honed crisis skills have disappeared, her blood running cold and her brain shutting down in fear as she stares at him.

“Malick has FitzSimmons.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team mounts a mission to rescue Fitz and Simmons from Malick. Things come to a head for Skye/Daisy, as she is torn between her loyalty to Shield and Ward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is! The mid-season finale, hopefully you enjoy my version of it. This chapter clocks in at a whopping 8,000 words so strap yourselves in. This is really the climax of the story, with just the epilogue to follow this and wrap things up and then we're all done.

__

 

_Don't you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this? ― Søren Kierkegaard_

 

 

She grabs at her clothes, stumbling a little as she shoves her legs into her jeans, Ward’s hand coming out to steady her. She flinches away from his touch, she doesn’t mean to, and she can see the way his face closes off in response. But she can’t stop the thoughts running through her mind that this only happened because she was gone. Because she was with  _Ward._  Her friends were taken, while she lay in the arms of a man who tried to kill them.

She knows her being on the base would have been unlikely to change anything, it’s not like they were grabbed from there anyway, but she can’t stop the guilt that is clawing its way through her. She keeps her eyes averted from their tangled sheets and hastily clasps her bra and pulls her shirt over her head before finally looking back at Ward. He’s standing there in just his jeans, looking at her with his jaw clenched, looking like he’s trying his hardest to keep his face impassive.

“I don’t understand why he took them. Is it just a way to draw me out or does he need them for something too?” She asks, running her hands through her hair, trying to remove any sign of their previous activities.

Ward avoids her gaze now and she feels her blood run cold as suspicion begins to creep up on her, so many fears of history repeating itself seizing her in their jaws. “What aren’t you telling me, Ward?”

“Malick has built a machine, a way to try and hold the portal open without you.” He meets her eye squarely now, the rigid set of his jaw showing what an effort it takes.

Staring at him, mouth parted in shock, she can’t quite make his words make sense. “You knew that…and you came here tonight and you didn’t say a thing to me?”

“I have a source. He told me that there were problems with the design, that they couldn’t get it to work.” He looks at her so desperately, taking half a step closer to her before freezing at the look in her eyes. She can’t do this again. The betrayal might be different but this dance feels the same.

“I thought I had time,” he says, his tone almost pleading now. “I thought I could fix this, I could keep you out of it, and out of his hands, and you would be safe. I thought I could make it right.”

“And instead he took FitzSimmons to fix the flaw in the design. How would he know to take them, how would he know that they had anything to do with the portal?” The accusation, as obliquely expressed as it was, hangs heavy in the air between them, she can see the way he falters and then hardens himself as the implication washes over him.

“You really think I’d do that? You don’t think I’d have learned my lesson?” He slams his hand roughly against his right side and the scars she knows lay underneath his shirt, and she feels it as though it was her own skin. Everything about the soft moment they shared where she kissed his wounds is turned ugly now, old anger and bitterness seeping back through their skin, desperate for an outlet. “Because you seemed pretty sure about teaching it to me last year. You even left me with this handy study guide in case I forgot."

She wants to crumble, wants to cry, wants to crawl back between the still warm sheets and turn time back to before her phone rang. But she can also feel the hurt, the still burning sting of his betrayal, as it flares back to full force in the light of her sudden suspicions. ( _Because how could she let herself believe in happily ever after, even if only for a moment, after everything that life has taught her?_ )

“You aren’t the only one here with scars, Ward. You remember that lovely gift I got from ‘The Clairvoyant’ don’t you?”

“I had  _nothing_  to do with that. I told you that, I never would have let that happen if I knew what Garrett was planning.”

“But you still followed him!” She is yelling now, and her cheeks feel wet before she even realizes she began to cry. “He almost had me killed, and you knew it was him, and you let me… You made me believe that you-”

She cuts herself off before she can complete the words. Whatever else was said between them that word was never said aloud and she will not be the first to utter it now. Instead she takes a deep breath, tries to control the shaking in her voice as she aims for his heart. “You knew what he did, and you still chose him over me in the end. Over all of us. You dropped FitzSimmons out of the plane, you nearly killed them. How am I supposed to trust that you didn’t do it again?”

“I still came for you,” he snaps at her bitterly. “When Coulson said you needed help. Even though I was done with Shield and wanted nothing more than to be left in peace. Even though he threatened both me and Kara. Even though I knew it would probably end up with my imprisonment or death. I still came. And I finished the mission, even after Simmons tried to kill me. I still made sure you and your team go out safely.”

Her jaw drops. “Simmons did what?”

His laugh is bitter and barely audible. “Yeah, your precious biochemist threw a splinter bomb right at me. The only reason I’m here today is because Bakshi jumped in front of me and died instead.”

“Ward, I… I don’t know what to say.”

He just looks tired now, all the fight gone out of him, his eyes begging her for something that has always felt just out of reach. “I just wanted to keep you safe. I thought… Everything else I’ve ever done when it comes to you, I’ve done it wrong. I know that now, but this… I thought if I could keep you out of his way, then I could take care of him on my own. That I could keep you safe.”

“Keep me safe. And what about you?”

He just looks at her, his face carefully blank, and shrugs.

And just like that the fire raging through her is gone. The anger seeps out of her and without it she feels exhausted, empty. “I have to go. I have to do something to help them.”

“No.” He sounds so fierce, so adamant. “That is not happening. You are not going to risk him capturing you again.”

“Well, now he has FitzSimmons. What if he kills them?”

“So, your solution is what? Go there and let him kill you instead? This is exactly why I didn’t tell you about the damn machine.”

“He needs me, you said that yourself.”

“He  _did_  need you to hold the portal open. What happens now that he doesn’t? Either he doesn’t need you at all anymore and you’re expendable, or he decides he has some other purpose for you. Neither of those seem like good options to me.” The desperation in his voice and in his face, wars with the frustrated tone she knew so well when he was her SO.

She looks at him sadly and shakes her head. “They’re my family, Grant. They’re all I have left.”

He looks so beaten down, like this fight has taken so much more out of him than he could even begin to name. She understands because she feels it too.

As she gathers up her jacket and heads for the door, she glances toward the bed, the sheets still a tangled mess and she wishes that she could have stayed in that moment forever. But it was a fantasy. Maybe there is just too much between them for the two of them to ever have an honest chance at making this real, but for just a moment it felt so close she could almost taste the happiness they could have. But the world outside is always beating down their door.

 

By the time she arrives back at the base, the emotional toll of her worry for FitzSimmons, combined with the way her night with Ward went from one extreme to the other, has left her feeling so completely wiped out that all she wants to do is crawl into some small dark space and forget the rest of the world exists for a few hours. But there’s no time for that. The entire base is in motion, people bustling past her, voices shouting orders through the halls, as the team prepares for the rescue mission.

Lincoln is the first person who actually stops. He looks just as lost as she feels in the chaos going on around them.

“What’s happening? We’re heading out already, no briefing?” She asks him, feeling entirely off kilter already and the idea of jumping straight into the mission leaves her with a faint feeling whiplash.

“Coulson wants us in the air ASAP. Said he’ll fill us in on the plan on the way,” he tells her.

“But -”

May sweeps by them, calling over her shoulder at them “Wheels up in five minutes, get your gear and get to the plane.”

 

Once they’re in the air Coulson gathers them by the monitors, where he has pulled up a satellite image of a large estate, fairly isolated by the look of it, but the grounds themselves look like a hive of activity.

“Fitz and Simmons were off base with Agent Banks, filling in gaps on the project he worked on for NASA with Rosalind and Gideon Malick, Distant Star, that sent Will Daniels to the alien planet. He took them to the facility the project was run out of. From what we can figure Malick must still have someone on the inside because he knew exactly where they would be.”

“What about Banks? And why didn’t they have some kind of security with them?’

“They did. Both the soldiers guarding them and Banks were killed onsite.”

Somehow it is only at that moment that she becomes aware of the dozen or so of Rosalind’s men at the edge of the group, all of the faces hardening in grief at Coulson’s words. As much conflict as there was between Banks and herself, she is reminded that, for these men, he was their leader. And he died trying to protect her friends.

“Fitz was wearing a tracking beacon, so we know they are being held in Gloucestershire, England.” That catches everyone’s attention. “Yeah, it’s the same castle where we got Simmons back. I just can’t figure out why Malick took FitzSimmons. Why now? Was it just to draw Daisy out or does he have some other purpose he needs them for?”

“Dammit, he’s going to open the portal already,” she mutters under her breath.

Coulson turns to her with a confused look. “What was that? What do you mean ‘already’? Where exactly were you when I called you back to base, anyway?”

“I told you, I had a lead to follow up, information about this Inhuman that Hydra is so desperate to get back. My…source told me that Malick has built a machine that can hold the portal open.” She pauses, hopes nobody noticed the flinch as she spoke, but she can tell by the suspicious look on Coulson’s face that he, at least, did. “If he can get FitzSimmons to make it work, then he doesn’t need me at all. The portal might already be open by the time we get there.”

Mack leans forward, resting his forearms against the table. “Okay, so that’s definitely bad news. Did you learn anything else about the creature Hydra wants?”

“Apparently the creature possesses the bodies of the dead. It can use their memories and their skills, anything they knew in life he knows. It is essentially immortal. If it’s host is destroyed, It moves on to another body.”

“So we’d have no way of knowing for sure who It was, and no way of being sure we defeated it?” May asks her, a look of barely contained alarm on her face.

“Exactly.”

Bobbi speaks up, looking at Coulson, “Sir, we can’t risk it. If we don’t know how to defeat it, and It could take over any body around it, we can’t let it back through. The risk is just too high.”

“But what about this Will bloke Simmons is so desperate to rescue? We just leave him there with the monster then?” Hunter asks, looking around at them all with thinly veiled horror.

“How would we even know if it was really Will that came through the portal? If the creature can possess anybody, wouldn’t the person stuck on a desolate planet with him for the last decade be a pretty good candidate for a host?” Lincoln tries to reason, seeming a little trepidatious about speaking out at first, but growing more firm in his conviction as he speaks.

Coulson nods gravely. “I agree. If what Daisy’s source said about this Inhuman’s abilities is true, we can’t risk It coming back through the portal. We get FitzSimmons out of there and then destroy the portal for good. We have to weigh the risk to the lives of everyone on Earth against one man, who may not even still be alive.”

A heavy silence lingers after his words. No one can dispute them, but the idea of potentially sacrificing a man who, by all reports, was a good and innocent man, a man who saved Simmons, does not sit easily in any of their minds.

Everyone seems to retreat, keep to themselves for the rest of the duration of the flight. Coulson finally gathers them back together as they approach England, laying out the plan he has come up with. “Teams going in are Daisy and Mack; Lincoln and May; Bobbi and Hunter. I’ll stay onboard and monitor the situation on the ground.”

Everyone nods in response to the team assignments, gathering the last of their gear and suiting up.

Pointing at the images on the monitors, Coulson says, “We know he is holding Fitz and Simmons here, and from the satellite images we are fairly certain that this is also where Malick has the gel matrix pods holding all of the Inhumans that the ATCU put into stasis.”

“So there’s a good chance this is also where he has Andrew,” May breaks in.

“Right. So, we cloak and those of you going in on the ground take the quinjet. Rosalind’s men are in charge of retrieving the pods and getting them far enough from the castle that we can land Zephyr One and getting them all on board before getting back in the air. The rest of you search the grounds for where he is holding FitzSimmons and find Gideon Malick. Capture is preferable, but you are authorized to take him out if you need to. FitzSimmons are the priority though. Once everyone is clear, we blow the portal and the castle.”

As everyone involved in the infiltration begins to make their way to the quinjet, to prepare for the approach, she can’t shake the feeling of trepidation that takes hold. She knows she always feels nerves before a mission, but this feels different. This feels like the end of something, in some way she can’t explain even to herself. As she straps herself into her seat, ready for landing, the feeling only grows.

They land a safe distance from the castle, leaving the quinjet cloaked and the entire group moving as stealthily through the darkness as a group of their size can manage. It takes them only minutes to reach the edge of the the well lit grounds surrounding the castle. From there, they pause to take stock of the situation from the ground.

The castle itself is completely illuminated, the grounds surrounding it are lit up by floodlights and covered in a series of huge white tents and canvas-covered trucks. It almost looks like a military base, complete with men in fatigues hurrying from tent to tent, and heading for the castle.

With near silent communication, the group splinters off into smaller teams. Rosalind’s men head for the tents and the stasis chambers, most of them armed with knives instead of guns to hold onto the element of surprise for as long as they can manage. May and Lincoln follow them, to search for Fitz and Simmons in the labyrinth of tents, while she and Mack join Bobbi and Hunter as they head towards the castle.

Once they breach the castle she and Mack veer off to left while Bobbi and Hunter head for the lower levels. Climbing the stairs, everything in the place gives off a seriously creepy vibe. She was not a fan of this place the last time they were here and this return visit is not changing her mind at all.

Considering the hive of activity outside, and opposition Bobbi and Hunter seem to encountering as they approach the basement, the upper levels of the castle seem deserted. There are still just enough lights lit to make her suspicious though, and she swears she can hear footsteps moving behind her, but every time she turns to look there’s no one there.

May’s voice comes through the comms connection. “We have a problem. We’ve located Simmons, and she’s fine, but Lash was released from the containment unit.”

They both pause, Mack turning to look at her with clear alarm. The thought of Lash, uncontained around all of those helpless inhumans in the stasis pods, is horrifying. Before she can even voice that concern though, Bobbi is speaking, her words sending Daisy’s blood running cold. “Uh, guys? We have an even bigger problem. The portal has already been opened, Malick’s men have gone through it and there is only a few hours left before it’s set to open again for them to return with the creature.”

“What about Fitz? Did you find him?” Mack asks, concern in his voice.

“He’s here. He’s ok. But we need to get out of here right now if we’re going to blow the portal before they have a chance to reopen it.”

“Can you just turn the machine off somehow? Break it?”

“Fitz says it can’t be turned off. So the only way we can keep that thing out is to blow the whole place.”

She can hear Fitz in the background, arguing with them, and Hunter trying to explain what they’ve learned about the Inhuman, and how it has been decided that it is just too dangerous to risk letting anyone through the portal.

Daisy breaks in, trying to ignore the anguish she can hear in Fitz’s tone through the others’ comms, “We still have to find Malick.”

“If we destroy the portal is that really still a priority? I know he’s Hydra but isn’t keeping that thing from coming back through the portal more important here?” Hunter asks.

“There are other places where a portal can be opened, and now that Malick knows how to build this machine he could use any one of them and we’d never know. We have to take him out,” Daisy replies.

“May, is your situation under control?” Bobbi asks.

“Yes. Find Malick, we have Price’s men here to help us.”

“Ok. Mack, Daisy, we’re heading your way. If you two search the upper floors we can finish our sweep of the lower ones and we can meet in the middle.”

“On it.” Mack reports.

She has only taken roughly six more steps, Mack moving steadily in front of her, when a hand literally appears to reach out from behind a painting and grab ahold of her. She is dragged through the narrow opening before it slams shut behind her.

It takes her a minute to wrap her head around what just happened, because seriously, a secret trap door? What is this, Scooby Doo? The sheer ridiculousness of it distracts her from the seriousness of her situation and she almost snickers before the fact that she is trapped, stuck on the other side of a wall from her backup in some secret corridor and surrounded by half a dozen Hydra agents, sinks in.

She can hear Mack, pounding on the other side of the wall, trying to find the door, yelling her name. She opens her mouth to call back, but one of the goons smacks her head against the wall. She doesn’t quite lose consciousness, but she feels dazed and everything definitely goes hazy. The almost tickling sensation of the small trail of blood running down her cheek is the only thing she can focus on. She is only faintly aware of her hands being bound behind her back, of being marched down the narrow passageway. She’s aware in some vague distant way that she’s in shock, possibly concussed, but still, that warm trickle of blood is all she can pay attention to.

So it’s with a start when she suddenly becomes aware that they’ve stopped in what appears to be a study of some kind, and Gideon Malick himself is standing before her. Her hands are secured and there is one of Malick’s men gripping each of her arms, but still she fights against their grip, trying to send a wave of energy to blast them away from her.

“Uh-ah ah,” Malick tuts at her, a condescending smirk on his face as he leans in close to her like they’re sharing secrets. “You try anything like that and you’ll bring this whole place down on top of us… On top of  _your_  team too.”

Regardless, she continues to struggle against the iron grip holding her restrained as Malick turns his back on her and strolls across the room, reaching for a bottle of scotch and a glass before turning back to face her again.

“You know, we could work together, you and I. We could accomplish great things with your abilities. You could stand by my side as we return your people to the position they deserve in this world, with the help of our leader.” He looks so smug, so sure the war is already won before they have even began to fight. But of course that’s the problem with people like him, like John Garrett, ( _like her mother_ ), they don’t fight fair. It’s easy to think you’ll win when you’ve already stacked the deck.

She stays silent, fuming, using his lack of attention on her to scope the room for a possible weakness or weapons. If she could only get out of these cuffs, get rid of Malick’s goons holding her, she could destroy everyone in the room. But the cuffs are holding tight and the goons are looming over her, looking stupid but still managing to pull off intimidating pretty well. Her head is still spinning from the blow she took earlier too.

“Well, either way I will have you work for me. If you’re willing, it’ll certainly make things easier, but I can ensure your cooperation in other ways if necessary.” The dark look he sends her way now chills her through completely, he already proved, more than once now, that he is capable of reaching her and the team no matter where they are.

She knows Coulson won’t blow up the castle if she is still inside, and if Bobbi and Hunter and Fitz couldn’t manage to destroy the machine completely then that portal is going to be opening again soon, and the Inhuman will be unleashed.

She is scared now, as much as she keeps it hidden. She is alone here with him and the castle is huge. Who knows how long it might take for the team to find them, and what kind of trap would they be walking into anyway?

Even as she thinks that, the door suddenly crashes open, and there is Ward. For just a moment she wonders if she’s hallucinating and then the pressure on her arm increases. One of the flunkies gripping her starts to drag her towards the other exit at the far side of the room, then all of a sudden it is gone. The shock at the sight of the big man suddenly falling to the ground somehow delays her senses, and it takes a moment for the fact that he has been shot in the head, a neat round hole between his eyes, to sink in.

As she stands there, staring down in shock at the man whose fingers were bruising her flesh only moments ago, the room erupts into chaos. The second guard had dropped her arm to return fire as soon as Ward came through the door, but he drops to the ground to join his buddy in an instant. She snaps back into attention, her hands are still cuffed behind her back, so her options are limited, but she still dodges the attempts by Malick’s remaining guards to grab her as she beats a path to the door.

There is the slightest pressure of someone’s hands grabbing at her and then another popping sound and they’re gone. She glances over her shoulder at Ward, losing her focus for just an instant but it’s enough. She freezes as she feels the barrel of a gun pressed against her temple, and then another one of Malick’s guards is sliding an arm across her shoulder, pulling her body tightly back against his. There is nothing sexual in his embrace, but it makes her feel violated all the same, his breath fanning across her cheek in a gross perversion of intimacy.

She freezes, the barrel of the gun hot against her skin, and surveys the situation. Ward is standing in the center of the room, a gun in each hand and both of them still raised despite the fact that five out of the six of Malick’s guards are on the floor, none of them breathing. The guard holding her pulls her back until he is pressed against the wall, holding her in front of him as a shield, as a threat.

Malick simply raises his glass in a mock toast, appearing completely unruffled despite the chaos that just descended.

“Mr. Ward, I don’t remember inviting you to the party.”

“Well you know me, can never resist a chance for a nice drink,” he nods to the bottle next to Malick. “Now, how about you let her go, and I’ll even let you finish your glass.”

“Oh Mr. Ward, it’s entertaining that you think that might happen. She is going to accompany me as we claim the respect and authority we deserve. There was a place for you at that table once. I might even be able to be convinced to let you work for it still.”

Ward doesn’t say a word, just takes a few steps back until he is in a position where he has the wall behind him and he can see both her and Malick without turning his head, keeping one of his guns levelled at the guy holding her, his face devoid of expression. “I think I’ll pass, thanks all the same.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to think about that a little more in depth? I would hate for a rash decision to have an effect on the lovely Miss Johnson here.”

“It’s  _Agent_ , you pompous ass,” she grits out, rejoining the conversation swirling around her.

“I do love that fire in you,” the smirk on his face makes her skin crawl. “Together, standing at the side of our leader, we could accomplish some amazing things. The power you could have, not just for yourself but for  _your_  people. Don’t you owe it to them to take charge of your destiny now?”

“I’ve heard that before. It’s funny how people only want me to ‘take charge of my destiny’ when it follows their plans.”

“Ah, but having a well thought out plan can make things so much more simple; helps you eliminate any weaknesses. Wouldn’t you say, Mr. Ward?”

Ward simply stares back at him, completely stone faced. “Don't talk to me about weakness, old man. Weakness is following others blindly. Learned that the hard way.”

“I’m not asking you to follow, I’m saying you could lead. Both of you. She’s the one you gave up on your quest for vengeance for, isn’t she? I can understand it, she’s quite remarkable. Those abilities of hers really are incredible, the havoc she can wreak. And the path of destruction you cut through my base to get her out the last time I had her in my possession. You’ve more than proved you’ve earned your reputation. Just think of what the two of you could be capable of, together, with our resources behind you.”

“Wow. And here I thought you only wanted me to stand there and look pretty,” Daisy snarks at him.

The guard still holding her pressed firmly against him chuckles, the sound rumbling along her spine as he leans down to murmur in her ear, “You’re doing a fine job of that already, sweetheart.”

She feels his body jerk against her, and something warm spray against the side of her neck, a moment before the sound of the gunshot registers. The guy moving his head to put his mouth against her ear must have finally given Ward a clear shot at him, she realizes in a very detached way.

For the first time, Malick actually looks unnerved. “Now - ”

Whatever he might have been planning to say is cut off as Ward turns his gun on him next: three bullets in tight formation, center mass. Malick has just a moment to glance down in surprise, his hand reaching up towards the crimson blooming across his chest, before collapsing.

Ward is moving towards her even before Malick’s body has hit the floor, his hands cupping her cheeks, his eyes searching hers. He reaches to wipe away the splatter of the guard’s blood that drips down her neck, his touch gentle but his hands shaking slightly.

“You’re ok, you’re ok.” He keeps murmuring it under his breath and at first she thinks he’s saying it to comfort her and she opens her mouth to tell him that she’s perfectly fine and she knows it, but pauses when she really notices the pallor of his face and the fear in his eyes. He’s not saying it for her, he’s saying the words like they’re a prayer, to reassure himself.

“Ward,” she interrupts him, “Grant. I’m fine, I’m ok. Everything is ok.”

She tries to move her hand to his cheek, to try and physically ground him with her touch, but instead she just ends up being reminded of the ties keeping her hands bound behind her. She makes a distressed noise and he looks at her, confused, until she draws his attention to her wrists.

“Right. Zip ties. Knife?” He seems entirely like he’s operating on autopilot, her attempt at calming words going completely unnoticed.

“You don’t have a knife?” She is trying to keep the incredulity out of her tone, but she doesn’t think she manages very well. He doesn’t seem to notice anyhow.

“I lost it. Left it behind on my way up.”

By the the way he says it she can easily imagine that he doesn’t just mean he dropped it as he ran through the halls. She can’t bring find it in herself to feel sorry for the man whose blood was spilled with it on Ward’s frantic run to get to her though, even though she knows the old Skye would have. Right now all her focus is on getting out of here so Coulson can blow the portal before it reopens and unleashes untold horrors on them all, and also on how the hell she is going to get Ward out of here in the state he’s in at the moment, without the team being alerted to his presence.

“Okay. I don’t have one on me. Maybe check that guy?” She nods at the guard who was holding her when she first came into the room.

Ward rummages through the guy’s uniform, coming up empty if the frustrated look on his face is anything to go by. He moves on to the next body, his hands rough as he searches, finally finding a small blade strapped to his inner ankle. He walks back to her, stepping over the bodies of the fallen Hydra agents like it means nothing.

His hands are still trembling just a little, as he holds her wrists so gently, and it takes two tries to slice through the plastic ties.

As soon as her hands are free she shakes her wrists, the blood rushing back through the skin that bears deep marks from her too-tight binding.

The completely emotionless but entirely capable way he is handling things would almost be comforting if it wasn’t for the way his hands shake every time he touches her. He is still completely alert: his body coiled tightly, his eyes shifting restlessly around the room, listening for any kind of sound of danger.

“Grant,” she says softly, reaching for one of his hands. He seems to startle a little at her touch, but she keeps her grip firm, using it to pull him closer to her. Reaching her other hand up she slides it along the side of his jaw before gripping his hair lightly and pulling his face down closer to hers, until his forehead rests against her own. She knows there is no time for a quiet moment like this, just the two of them forgetting about the world for just a moment, lost in the sounds of their breathing evening out as they fall into sync. But he needs this.  _She needs this._

After everything that has happened in the last 20 minutes, hell, in the last 20 hours, she needs this quiet moment to ground herself again. To hold him close and feel like everything is going to be fine now, even she knows it won’t be, that nothing is ever as easy as she wishes it were.

But she wants this, and so she takes it. Murmuring softly to him as she feels her own trembling ease in his warmth, “I’m okay.  _We’re_  okay. We’re gonna be okay.”

And of course that is the moment that she hears the footsteps thundering through the halls, echoing til she can’t figure out which direction they’re coming from exactly, like they’re surrounded. She feels Ward’s grip on her tighten for just a second before he takes a deep breath, presses his lips softly to her hair, and steps back and turns just as the door he came through bursts open again.

He has his gun raised again before she can even fully grasp where he had put it. She’s not sure what happened to his second gun, and the guards who grabbed her earlier disarmed her, but she doesn’t exactly need a weapon to defend herself.

In the confusion of the moment, it takes her a second to become fully aware of the way he has positioned himself in front of her, to shield her. As much as she appreciates the sentiment, she rolls her eyes at him and steps to the side, so she is standing beside him as the Hydra agents pour through the door like a wave. She’s sure that if she could actually assess the scene properly, there are probably a lot less than there seem to be. But with only the two of them (and only one of them armed) she can’t help but feel like the odds are not in their favor.

She raises her hands, trying to focus her powers as tightly as she can manage, because Malick was right and the last thing she needs to risk is the whole castle coming down on top of them, sending a small cluster of agents flying back against the wall. Ward has managed to drop a few of them, but there are still at least half a dozen Hydra goons crowding in on them in the not particularly large room, and there appear to be more swelling in the hallway behind them.

She is just about to try and suggest to Ward that they make a break for the secret passageway she was brought into the room through, when she realizes she can hear the sound of more feet pounding along the corridor on that side of the wall now too. She turns so her back is pressed against Ward’s, facing the small doorway with her hands raised and ready to push back the next wave.

And then Bobbi and Hunter come crashing through the door instead. The two of them freeze as they take in the tableau before them - the fact that the two of them are clearly working as a team, the way that Ward turns and curves his body protectively around hers at this sudden new potential onslaught. Even the Hydra agents seem to pause for just a moment, as though they somehow grasp the gravity of this moment. (Even though she knows it’s much more likely that they’re simply attempting to regroup at this sudden change to the situation.)

And then the Hydra guys are firing at all four of them, so whether they want to be or not, the Shield agents have ended up somewhat on the same side as Ward.

She swings her hands up again to push them back, but it’s too chaotic for her powers to be of much use without risking the already questionable structural integrity of the castle.

Dropping down on one knee while the others provide covering fire, she quickly searches the body of one of Malick’s fallen guards for a weapon. A bullet whistles over her head just as she ducks down to try and pull the gun out of the corpse’s hand. Glancing up reflexively as she crouches down even lower, she sees Ward turn to check her just as one of the Hydra agents fires at him. Her hand is up and sending a pulse out to repel the bullets before she even thinks through the consequences. The way the bricks in the old walls rattle and the dust that falls from above them is enough of a warning to her, though.

From the corner of her eye she catches Hunter staring at her in shock, before he turns back to the fight.

She swings her newly recovered weapon up and takes aim. With all four of them armed now they seem to be definitely gaining the upper hand, as the flow of Hydra agents pouring through the door seems to slow to a trickle.

With one final headshot at the last man standing, Hunter rounds on her with a furious look in his eye. “What the bloody hell is going on here?!”

As he raises his gun to aim it at Ward, she finds herself stepping in front of him almost unconsciously, not even aware that she’s moved until she feels Ward’s hands grip her shoulders reassuringly before he tries to move away from her.

“No,” she says firmly, reaching back and grabbing his arm to hold him where he is.

“Are you kidding me?!” Hunter cries incredulously. “Bob, you’ve got a clear angle, fucking shoot him!”

Frantic, she turns to Bobbi, her hands half flexed and ready to deflect any possible bullets that might be fired from either direction, but Bobbi just shakes her head, her expression set in that careful blankness she has seen so many times in May and Ward.

“Right now, we need to get out of here before Coulson blows that portal to kingdom come. We can deal with…anything else later.”

Daisy tries to send a grateful look her way, but Bobbi refuses to meet her eye. And as she examines the other agent closer she sees the way her hands are shaking slightly. Once again, she feels so torn between these two irreconcilable needs: the team is the only family she has left, but as she has slowly come to accept in these last weeks, Ward is not something she is prepared to live without either. How can she try to hold on to anything with him, when he has personally brought so much pain to the people she loves? When they have brought so much pain to  _him_?

The mention of the impending explosion seems to be enough to motivate Ward and he moves swiftly for the main door, walking warily by Hunter, who flinches as he passes but maintains his glare nonetheless.

She quickly moves to keep her body between Ward’s back and their weapons as he leads the way back down through to the main staircase.

The four of them make their way swiftly through the halls, the only time they speak at all when she asks, “Where are Mack and Fitz? Are they ok?”

“They’re fine. They should be waiting outside for us. Mack told us what happened, with the hidden door. I’ve had some experience with those so we volunteered to look for you,” Bobbi replies, her tone clipped.

“Looks like you already had a rescue though,” Hunter mutters under his breath.

It’s almost a relief when they turn the next corner and come face to face with another five Hydra guards. It breaks the tension in their unwilling alliance anyway, as they are all thrown back into combat. Everyone seems to have opted for hand-to-hand fighting rather than guns this time, and there is no small part of her that feels relieved that she doesn’t have to worry about stray bullets making their way from Hunter’s weapon to Ward’s skull.

She ducks low to avoid a punch, swinging her knee up to catch her opponent in the stomach and bringing her elbow down on him hard when he doubles over in response. Hurling the next guy that comes at her against the wall, she pauses to note that all of the Hydra agents seem to be on the ground and unconscious. Breathing heavily, she glances around for Ward, standing straight in shock when she realizes he’s nowhere to be seen.

“This way,” Hunter calls to her as he starts to head down one of the hallways. “He went after one of the guys that took off.”

She turns to follow him before Bobbi’s voice stops her.

“Hunter! Daisy!” Bobbi shouts at them, “Come on, we have to get out of here.”

“I can’t…” She trails off, because how can she tell this woman, her friend, that she can’t leave behind the man who tortured her for hours?

“Bob, we have to take him in, at least,” Hunter argues, his body still half poised to run down the corridor.

“We don’t have time. That portal could open at any minute. We have to go. NOW.”

She half runs, is half dragged by Bobbi’s grip on her wrist through the final corridor. As they breach the doors, bursting out into the cool night air, she sees with a shock the chaos that clearly descended out here as well. The neatly arranged tents and floodlights are in shambles, the castle lawn looking like a warzone.

As Bobbi drags her across the grounds she keeps looking behind her, still waiting to see Ward come running through the doors.

As she turns back to watch her steps though, she sees Mack and Fitz waiting for them, relieved grins breaking across both their faces at the sight of the three of them running across the lawn towards them.

“Coulson, we’re clear. Where’s the quinjet?” Bobbi reports, once they reach a safe distance from the castle.

“May is coming back for you guys now, hold tight. We’ve just gotten the last of the stasis pods unloaded from the quinjet now.”

“And Lash?”

“We got him back inside the containment module. He’s onboard too, sedated for the time being.”

As the quinjet touches down in front of them, her eyes search the grounds for any sign of Ward, her panic growing. She knows she can’t go back into the castle to look for him. She’s pretty sure if the team believed Ward was still in there it would only make them fire the missile sooner. But she can’t just get on that quinjet and let them blow the place to dust without knowing that he is clear.  _She can’t leave him behind._

“Daisy! C’mon!” Mack shouts at her from where he stands on the open ramp, the others already strapped into their seats behind him. She feels frozen, helpless. She can’t say a word that will save him, but she can’t be the one that leaves him to that fate either, she can’t leave without knowing that he made it out.

She spins around, one last frantic glance around the chaos that remains of the Hydra compound, her body half-turned into a lunge back to the castle when she sees him.

He is standing at the edge of the woods, his body half swallowed by the darkness around him until he takes a step towards her. They both freeze as their eyes meet, everything else forgotten for just a moment as she drinks in the sight of him - whole and safe, if not a little bloody and battle-worn, looking at her with a weary half smile. ( _Looking at her like she is everything he ever needed._ )

She is faintly aware of Mack shouting her name again, moving down the ramp towards her, and she is overcome by the strongest urge to run to Ward. To slip away into the darkness with him and leave everything else behind. But then Mack’s hand is on her shoulder, pulling her back to reality, and when she glances back at the spot where Ward was standing, only the dark woods remain.

“What’s going on?” Mack questions, “We’ve got to get out of here like five minutes ago.”

“I know, sorry. I thought… I thought I saw something.” She shakes her head at him, forces herself to smile like everything is normal. “It was nothing, let’s go.”

“You sure?” he asks, a look of concern coloring his features.

“Yep, just shadows. Let’s get in the air.”

With one final glance over her shoulder, she makes her way up the ramp behind him.

As soon as they are all on board the quinjet, May radios Coulson to let him know they’re clear, flipping switches as they begin to rise off the ground.

Fitz is still trying to convince them all that there has to be another way, that they have to be able to rescue Will without letting the creature through, his voice rising in desperation, when the quinjet rocks with the shock wave from the explosion.

Through the windshield of the quinjet it looks like the world is on fire. Everyone falls silent, as though the explosion has sucked the power of speech from all of them. Or maybe just the events of the night have already managed that.

After the quinjet docks, it is a weary and silent team that makes their way down into the command center of Zephyr One.

Simmons is waiting for Fitz, her eyes red and her arms opening as he approaches, murmuring apologies against her hair as he holds her tight. The two of them retreat into their own world, the way they always have.

Coulson walks toward the rest of them, a tight smile warring with his somber expression. “Everyone okay?”

They nod tiredly in response before everyone makes their way further into the plane.

Lincoln walks towards her, a brilliant smile on his face but she only manages to respond weakly before easing herself down into a chair. He seems to understand her need for space and just quickly tells her that he’s glad she’s ok before walking away.

Bobbi and Hunter give her a wide berth, Hunter’s eyes still cold and questioning. May has retreated to the cockpit. Coulson, Mack, and Lincoln seem to be the only ones not retreating into themselves, and even they seem worn down by the events of the last day and night.

The stress of everything that happened with Ward, with Malick, with the weight her decisions are going to carry for those she loves, combined with the fact that she is closing in on 48 hours now without real sleep, begins to take a toll. As she leans her head back and lets the hum of the plane’s engines lull her to sleep, she knows that after everything that has happened now, there is no going back, no more pretending.

Everything is on the table now: with Ward, with the team, with herself. So now she finally has to decide what she really wants, who she really is. Which decisions she is willing to live with, and what she can’t live without.


	6. epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skye/Daisy has to decide what she wants, and who she really wants to be in the aftermath of the events at the castle.

__

 

_We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin. – André Berthiaume_

 

 

The team feels fractured in the aftermath of the fight against Malick and destroying the portal.

It is almost like no one can bear to be in the same room as the others, everyone splitting off into the small groups of people they can still make eye contact with. The hardest toll has been on Simmons, she has retreated to the lab and only seems to speak to Fitz. Bobbi and Hunter seem to keep mostly to themselves these days as well. May is gone again, helping Andrew readjust, try to learn some kind of control over his abilities. He is still confined, but Coulson seemed hopeful about his chances the last time she asked him.

Lincoln wants to find another place for their people, a safe haven like Afterlife, where they can be allowed to transition in peace. Where they can learn about their history, the good and the bad, and try to keep from repeating the mistakes of the past.

A part of her wants to join them, take up that part of her mother’s legacy ( _remembering Raina’s words from that awful day, about her destiny, mingling with Malick’s in her memory_ ), but she is afraid she’d feel just as much a fraud there.

She wonders if she should have just left Shield when Garner recommended it, after she got her powers. How much heartache could have been avoided, for everyone, if she had removed herself from the equation then? Would she have been able to start a new life, where no one knew her name? Or would everything still have happened exactly as it did no matter what she chose?

 

She tells Coulson she just needs a few weeks, to take some time to clear her head. But she can tell by the look in his eyes that he knows she won’t be coming back. However, he doesn’t call her out on the lie, and she is grateful for that. When he hugs her goodbye, for just a moment he feels like the AC who used to come looking for her when she’d hide in the darkened backseat of the SUV, and she finds herself clinging for just a moment longer when his hold starts to loosen.

He hasn’t said a word to her about Ward since the mission to rescue Fitz and Simmons and destroy the portal. She isn’t sure if that means that Bobbi and Hunter never told him exactly what they witnessed, which seems unlikely, or if it’s because the team seems to believe that Ward died when they bombed the castle. She wonders if this gentleness Coulson is treating her with now is because he believes she is grieving. Then she wonders just how much he knows of her connection to Ward, that such a belief would have him grant even a temporary reprieve for the severe reprimand she knows she’d get under any other circumstances. She is grateful for it either way.

She leaves a note for May with Coulson and he promises to make sure she gets it. A part of her is glad that she doesn’t have to say goodbye to May in person, but another part feels like if anyone would understand why she is leaving, it would be her SO. There is only so much of yourself you can give to an organization, to an ideal, before you are left hollow.

Mack looks sad, but not surprised, when he sees the bag slung over her shoulder. He is the only one she has broached this subject with in these past weeks. As much as he might want her to stay, he remembers what it was like when his values and needs clashed too strongly with the organization for him to feel like he could stay. She thinks he is hoping deep down that if she takes this time, then she’ll want to come back on her own. But she just doesn’t know if this is really where she belongs anymore.

As she makes her way through the halls of the base she passes Bobbi and Hunter bickering in the lounge. A part of her wants to stop, to say goodbye to the two of them. Even if she was never as close to either of them as she was to the others, they have been there through some of the biggest changes in her life. But the other part of her is well aware of the divide between them now, the line on which they have each taken a side.

Bobbi has been more distant in the days since the battle at the castle. She’ll speak if spoken to, but there has been a definite shift in their relationship. Hunter has become colder, the questions in his eyes about her connection to Ward is clear, but he seems either respectful or wary enough that he doesn’t approach her about it outright. She remembers his words, from what seems like a lifetime ago now, when he told her that eventually everyone needs an exit strategy. At the time it seemed unimaginable that she would ever leave Shield, but now she wishes she could say something to him about how right he was in the end. They were never close, but there was an easy camaraderie between them and she will miss it. She’ll miss this base, post-mission beers and playing video games. She’ll miss the adrenaline high of missions, the way that using her powers to help people made her feel. But Hunter was right, it’s a job, not a life. And somewhere along the way she lost that, lost any other part of her life. Remembering his words only strengthens her resolve, and she turns away from the two of them without a word.

 

She walks to the lab and stands in the doorway, looking in at FitzSimmons as they work quietly together on something. Their voices are subdued, their old energy and enthusiasm lacking, but it’s been that way for a long time now. She wants to say goodbye, wants to say sorry, wants to tell them she loves them, that they were the family she always wanted. But the words are stuck in her throat. How can she possibly put everything that the two them have meant to her into words? There isn’t a vocabulary for the things she feels; for the way that they are just as much a part of her as the pulse that beats through her body.

Simmons still isn’t ready to speak to her. She knows if she told her friend she was leaving for good that that would change, but she also knows the scientist would try and change her mind and she can’t do that. As much as it hurts to leave behind this place, these people, she knows if she stays, she will only lose more of herself as time goes on. Fitz must see something in her face though. He comes to the door to meet her, the question clear in his eyes. She shakes her head before he can speak, tears already stinging her eyes and she knows if she tries to say anything at all to him, she will break down. Instead, she pulls him into her arms, squeezes him tight, remembering the way he held her after San Juan, the way he protected her. He still has a look of confusion coloring his face when she pulls away, smiling lopsidedly at him as she wipes at her eyes, but he returns her nod goodbye. She glances back through the windows to the lab one last time, Simmons has looked up from her work now to watch them curiously and she can see the moment realization begins to dawn on the scientist’s face. Simmons looks a little like she might run toward them for a moment, but then their eyes meet through the glass and Daisy shakes her head as she smiles at her sadly, raising a hand in a half wave that Simmons mimics. They hold each other’s gaze for a long moment before she turns away, hoisting the single bag that holds all her worldly possessions onto her shoulder and heading for the exit.

 

Standing outside the base after the heavy door clanks shut behind her she stops and takes a deep breath, a mix of nerves and excitement making her exhale a little shaky. For the first time in so long, she is on her own and the idea is both terrifying and exhilarating. She doesn’t know who she is anymore, but maybe she can take the time to figure it out.

She buys a van, and drives south until she reaches Florida and can’t go any further. She rents a tiny overpriced apartment not far from the ocean. She volunteers at the local animal shelter, thinks of Cal and tries to make her peace with all the could-have-beens that she will never know. She swims in the ocean, her skin burns and the salt stings, and she feels like she is born anew.

She lives a quiet life, as unremarkable and under the radar as she can manage. Although she’s sure Coulson  _(or Ward)_  could easily find her if they tried, everyone seems to respect her wishes and leaves her be. Lets her take this time for herself.

She misses the team, the family she found and built, but she feels her shoulders loosen every day that she is gone. She likes to think that one day she might possibly go back, or maybe be able to hold onto some part of the connections that she formed there even if she is never a part of the team again. But she doesn’t know if that is truly possible. If the people she misses even honestly exist anymore, or if they got just as lost in the storm as she did.

She isn’t Skye anymore but she’s not sure if she can really be Daisy either. Ward was right, Daisy was the girl she never got a chance to become, and clinging to any part of the life that was never hers isn’t making her feel any better.

She mourns for all of the lost girls she has been, even as she sheds them like snakeskin: little Mary Sue the unwanted orphan, hacker Skye with her idealism and guileless faith in basic goodness of humanity, and the Daisy that she could have been - a girl with parents who loved her and who always knew where she belonged.

And she shrugs off the hardness of the Daisy she became, the aloof cynicism that ground her down until she was nothing but a shell of any of her previous selves.

She still doesn’t know exactly who she is now, but she feels closer to figuring it out than she has in a long time. She tries new foods, watches movies and reads for the first time in so long, eats fresh mangoes with the juice running down her fingers and her chin, spends some time figuring out the likes and dislikes of this new version of her that has emerged from the wreckage. She learns how to laugh again, how to smile at strangers. She will never have the idealism that she used to have, but maybe that’s ok. The world is a scary place and there  _are_  monsters under the bed. Idealism is not easiest quality to hold onto.

 

After six months of this new life of hers, she finally feels ready, strong enough in this new her she has been discovering, to try again, to take another chance at building something with Ward. She’s certain he would have been monitoring her enough to know she left Shield. A part of her has half expected him to turn up on her doorstep any day since she left, but eventually she decides he must have realized how much she has needed this space, that he has finally learned to respect her boundaries.

But now she is actively looking and she can’t find a trace of him, let alone any sign that he is looking for her after all. It takes so long to find anything that the fear begins to sink in that maybe he has finally taken her words to heart and is leaving her alone once and for all.

And then, finally, she finds them; hidden in a random backchannel she hasn’t even thought to check in so long. There are over a dozen messages, each one containing nothing but a seemingly random string of numbers and letters. She spends far too long trying to decipher a code that isn't there before she finally discovers that they are the live feeds for street cameras from all over the world. Madrid. Brussels. Zagreb. Johannesburg. Bangkok. Tokyo. Melbourne. She has no way of knowing how long ago he sent these messages, there is no trace of him in any of the feeds, but she monitors them all anyway. She spends the downtime actively trying to find any sign of him in any of those cities, any trail at all, but it's almost like Grant Ward has disappeared off the face of the planet entirely.

Ten days pass before a new message appears. A new set of numbers, a new feed, Vancouver this time. She pulls it up and waits. It takes a little over eleven hours before she sees him, finally. There is a crush of people crowding the footpath, a constantly moving sea of bodies, and somehow he stands completely still in the middle of it. He stands there for just a little under two minutes, his body facing the camera but his face tilted slightly down, people crashing against him like waves against rock, unmoving and uncaring. And then as the crowd finally thins, he looks up at the camera with a crooked smirk and a half wave (or maybe it's meant to be a salute) before turning away and disappearing into the flood of people. She smiles back at the screen, her fingertips still resting against the monitor where he had been standing moments ago, before jumping up and beginning to gather her things.

She doesn’t know how long he has been coming and waiting there for her like this, hoping that she finds his messages, hoping that she looks, hoping that she still wants the future they whispered about that night in his bed, but she can’t contain the joy that spreads through her at the fact that he has. She doesn’t know how long he will be staying in the city after sending her this message, doesn’t even know how exactly she is going to find him once she gets there. But she knows that she will - he wants her to find him.

Packing her few belongings takes her less than an hour, emailing her landlord and giving up the apartment done as she is halfway out the door. She has spent enough time figuring out who she is now, agonizing over every past decision. She is ready for her future to begin.

He is waiting for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The End. (Or, if you want to look at it differently: The Beginning, for the two of them.)
> 
>  
> 
> I need to say thank you again to my incredible beta stargazerdaisy. When I first started this story I had a few specific scenes in mind and a very scattered idea of how to tie them together, along with a great hope of being able to maybe stretch it out to 6,000 words. Without her help I honestly don't know that I would have gotten very far beyond that point, let alone to where it ended up. She put up with all my insecurities and neediness for the almost 2 months I took to write this without a break, and my words just would not sound as good without her editing (to the point that I honestly do believe she deserves at least partial co-writing credit no matter what she says). And you should all go check out her stories too.
> 
> This fic was the most ambitious thing I'd ever written back when I wrote it, and still stands as quite an epic effort for me, especially trying to get the entire thing finished before posting it. One of my biggest fears while writing this was that I would have spent so much time on it and no one would care in the end. So thank you to everyone who left kudos, subscribed and commented the first time around with this story. Losing all my comments on this fic was one of the things that broke my heart most about losing my old account. So if anyone feels the urge to comment again, you would make my month.


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